Super-cell from inner sectors of Active Antenna System (AAS) — Vertical sectorization

Active Antenna System (AAS) is an advanced antenna technology that features the ability of advanced beam-forming techniques to provide a great flexibility in cellular network deployment which enables improvements in network capacity and coverage. Conventionally, network dimensioning is done based on busy hour traffic leading to cost-intensive over-dimensioning for most of the time via deploying additional macro and small cells. In AAS, however, varying traffic concentrations can be flexibly handled by dynamic cell densification, e.g. by splitting a sector into smaller “sub-sectors”. Vertical sectorization is a well-known approach where a conventional sector is split vertically in to two, inner and outer sectors, resulting in 3×2 sectors per site for AAS-based tri-sectorized site. In this paper work, an alternative vertical sectorization deployment configuration is presented where the inner sectors build a so called super-cell resulting from transmitting the same cell information in all inner sectors. Investigation results show that the super-cell configuration can mitigate unwanted back and side lobe effects in close proximity of the site and, therefore, provides a significant gain for users in this coverage area.