DAS and UDN Solutions for Indoor Coverage at Millimeter Wave (mmWave) Frequencies

The future 5th Generation (5G) wireless networks are expected to support a variety of Bandwidth (BW) hungry applications. Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications, and Ultra Dense Network (UDN) deployment along with smart Distributed Antenna System (DAS) can be considered as a tempting solution for cellular networks. The aim of this paper is to analyze the performance of different UDN and DAS configurations in an indoor environment i.e. the real university office building at 3.5 GHz, 28 GHz, and 60 GHz frequency. System performance is analyzed by performing ray launching simulations using a three dimensional floor plan. The obtained results show the incapability of basic indoor solution in providing the ubiquitous Quality of Service (QoS) in an indoor environment at higher frequencies. Simulation results show that it is inevitable to have a dedicated indoor network with UDN or DAS configuration to provide homogeneous coverage in an indoor condition. It is found that in spite of more interference the UDN deployment provides a higher system capacity compared with DAS due to more number of cells. However, the gain of cell densification saturates with the increasing number of cells.