Increasing throughput and fairness in the downlink of cellular systems with N-fold sectorization

Conventional sectorized cellular systems deploy 3 or 6 sectors which are separated with directed antennas to avoid inter-sector interference and to spatially reuse available radio resources. However, innovations in next generation networks such as multi-antenna systems and distributed antenna systems allow mitigation and even exploitation of inter-sector interference. In this paper, we discuss how the antenna beamwidth needs to be adjusted to avoid or create inter-sector interference in order to maximize throughput while trying to increase fairness amongst users for non-cooperative and cooperative transmission concepts in sectorized cellular systems. A key result is: The introduction of intra-site cooperation renders higher-order sectorization reusing the antennas of conventional 3-fold sectorization attractive.