Network benefits of large advanced antenna systems

Antenna systems with many transceivers and antenna elements can achieve high system spectral efficiency by exploiting the multipath properties of the propagation channel. How to optimize the antenna properties such as number of antenna elements in the vertical and horizontal direction and antenna element separation is not obvious and relies very much on the assumption made about the channel. In this paper we investigate the dimensioning of large antenna arrays by mean of a tool based on the Winner II and Winner+ propagation models. The tool used in the simulations supports arbitrary antenna geometries with freely configurable 3D element patterns. In this article we present simulation results which show the impact of large antenna arrays on network performance for different antenna realizations.