Performance Impact of Base Station Antenna Heights in Dense Cellular Networks

In this paper, we present a new and significant theoretical discovery. If the absolute height difference between base station (BS) antenna and user equipment (UE) antenna is larger than zero, then the network performance in terms of both the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency will continuously decrease toward zero as the BS density increases in ultra-dense networks (UDNs). Such findings are completely different from the conclusions in the existing works, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular, this performance behavior has a tremendous impact on the deployment of the 5th-generation UDNs. Network operators may invest large amounts of money in deploying more network infrastructure only to obtain even less network capacity. This paper's results reveal that one way to address this issue is to lower the BS antenna height to the UE antenna height. However, this requires a revolutionized approach of the BS architecture and deployment, which is also explored in this paper.