Impact of Antenna Tilting on Propagation Shadowing Model

With active antenna systems (AAS) cell deployment changes can be handled rather flexible to meet the local and momentary capacity demands. Antenna tilt is one of the important parameters that should be properly adjusted in order to enhance the performance and efficiency of a cellular network. Simulative performance evaluation of these gains currently assumes radio propagation models where the shadowing map remains unchanged with respect to tilt changes. The assumption, however, may not be ralistic in particular to dense urban and urban scenarios. This paper investigates the impact of tilt on the shadowing map with regard to the current 3GPP assumptions. Moreover, the work tries to check if the shadowing process can be really assumed as stationary and independent from beam changes. The investigations are based on shadowing maps isolated from real world ray tracing propagation maps and has been carried out for urban scenario with various beam tilt settings.