Antenna characteristics impact on LTE inter-cell interference performance in urban scenarios

The main objective of this work was the evaluation of LTE performance in urban scenarios concerning inter-cell interference via antenna aspects. A detailed analysis of the effect of the antenna´s electrical downtilt on interference minimisation was addressed for the 800, 1800 and 2600 MHz bands in dense urban (centre of Lisbon) and urban (off-centre of Lisbon) environments, followed by an analysis of the vertical half-power beam width impact on one of those cases. A stochastically generated line of sight occurrence, a contiguous spectrum distribution and a received power based association of users to sectors was considered in a model intended to represent a real network as close as possible. In a high load scenarios analysis, it was found that although an electrical downtilt variation improves the number of users served per sector (up to 5.2% improvement) and user´s throughput (up to 27.3% higher throughput) over the reference scenario, best enhancements happen when a vertical half-power beam width variation is also considered, leading to improvements of 31.4% and 82.9%, respectively.