Enhancing LTE-Advanced network performance using active antenna systems

This work exploits the benefits of adaptive downtilt and vertical sectorization schemes for Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) networks equipped with active antenna systems (AAS). We highlight how the additional control in the elevation domain (via AAS) enables use of adaptive downtilt and vertical sectorization techniques, thereby improving system spectrum efficiency. Our results, based on a full 3 dimensional (3D) channel, demonstrate that adaptive downtilt achieves up to 11% cell edge and 5% cell average spectrum efficiency gains when compared to a baseline system utilizing fixed downtilt, without the need for complex coordination among cells. In addition, vertical sectorization, especially high-order vertical sectorization utilizing multiple vertical beams, which increases spatial reuse of time and frequency resources, is shown to provide even higher performance gains.