Antenna tilt and interaction with open loop power control in homogeneous uplink LTE networks

Antenna tilt is an effective inter-cell interference reduction technique which has been studied a lot previously in the CDMA-based systems. In this paper, we concentrate on the evaluations of the mechanical antenna downtilt in the uplink LTE networks. The SINR performance and the trade-off between the cell coverage and capacity are studied in a homogeneous scenario. Simulation results in Macro 1 show, downtilt angle at 12° to 16° has the optimal performance in terms of SINR and the cell coverage is maximized at downtilt angle 16°. The interaction of the antenna tilt with the open loop power control scheme defined in the 3GPP standard is also studied. Results show that, with certain ¿ value, there is no impact to the choice of optimal P₀ value with different antenna downtilt angles. For the ¿ value equal to 0.6 and 1.0 respectively, there are about 75% and 37.5% increases in terms of cell coverage and about 47% and 39% increases in terms of cell capacity.