100× Capacity Scaling of Cellular Networks

In view of the significant future traffic demands, the mobile industry has set its targets high, and has decided to improve the capacity of 21st centuries' networks by a factor of 100× or more over the upcoming years. In order to achieve this goal, vendors and operators are currently looking at densification, bandwidth, and spectral efficiency. This chapter aims at bringing common understanding and analysis of the potential gains and limitations of network densification, in combination with the use of higher frequency bands and spectral efficiency enhancement techniques. It sheds new light on the Pareto set of network configurations in terms of small cell density, frequency band of operation, and number of antennas per small cell base station (BS) that can meet future traffic demands, achieving an average throughput exceeding 1 Gbps per user equipment (UE). The system model is used in the chapter to analyze ultra‐dense small cell deployments.