The Effectiveness of Low Power Co-channel Lamppost Mounted 3G/WCDMA Microcells

This paper considers the effectiveness of low power lamppost mounted 3G/WCDMA microcells to capture traffic when deployed on a common carrier frequency with an overlaying 3G/WCDMA macrocell layer. The paper assesses the potential offload achieved through the deployment of thirteen low power (+24dBm maximum output power) lamppost mounted 3G/WCDMA microcells along a busy street in central London through both simulation and field trials. The paper concludes that low power +24dBm 3G/WCDMA microcells have the potential to significantly offload a co-channel macrocell layer, provided that the microcells are placed in areas of high traffic and are spaced close enough together (<100m) to provide contiguous microcell dominance.