IMPROVING THE CELL-EDGE

PERFORMANCE
MARCH 2, 2017 EMIL BJÖRNSON 2 COMMENTS

The cellular network that my smartphone connects to normally delivers 10-40 Mbit/s. That
is sufficient for video-streaming and other applications that I might use. Unfortunately, I
sometimes have poor coverage and then I can barely download emails or make a phone
call. That is why I think that providing ubiquitous data coverage is the most important goal
for 5G cellular networks. It might also be the most challenging 5G goal, because the area
coverage has been an open problem since the first generation of cellular technology.

It is the physics that make it difficult to provide good coverage. The transmitted signals
spread out and only a tiny fraction of the transmitted power reaches the receive antenna
(e.g., one part of a billion parts). In cellular networks, the received
signal power reduces roughly as the propagation distance to the power of four. This results
in the following data rate coverage behavior:

Figure 1: Variations
in the downlink data rates in an area covered by nine base stations.
This figure considers an area covered by nine base stations, which are located at the middle
of the nine peaks. Users that are close to one of the base stations receive the maximum
downlink data rate, which in this case is 60 Mbit/s (e.g., spectral efficiency 6 bit/s/Hz
over a 10 MHz channel). As a user moves away from a base station, the data rate drops
rapidly. At the cell edge, where the user is equally distant from multiple base stations, the
rate is nearly zero in this simulation. This is because the received signal power is low as
compared to the receiver noise.

What can be done to improve the coverage?

One possibility is to increase the transmit power. This is mathematically equivalent to
densifying the network, so that the area covered by each base station is smaller. The figure
below shows what happens if we use 100 times more transmit power:

Figure 2: The
transmit powers have been increased 100 times as compared to Figure 1.
There are some visible differences as compared to Figure 1. First, the region around the
base station that gives 60 Mbit/s is larger. Second, the data rates at the cell edge are slightly
improved, but there are still large variations within the area. However, it is no longer
the noise that limits the cell-edge rates—it is the interference from other base stations.

The inter-cell interference remains even if we would further increase the transmit
power. The reason is that the desired signal power as well as the interfering signal power
grow in the same manner at the cell edge. Similar things happen if we densify the network
by adding more base stations, as nicely explained in a recent paper by Andrews et al.
Ideally, we would like to increase only the power of the desired signals, while keeping the
interference power fixed. This is what transmit precoding from a multi-antenna array can
achieve; the transmitted signals from the multiple antennas at the base station add
constructively only at the spatial location of the desired user. More precisely, the signal
power is proportional to M (the number of antennas), while the interference power caused
to other users is independent of M. The following figure shows the data rates when we go
from 1 to 100 antennas:
 Figure 3: The number
of base station antennas has been increased from 1 (as in Figure 1) to 100.
Figure 3 shows that the data rates are increased for all users, but particularly for those at
the cell edge. In this simulation, everyone is now guaranteed a minimum data rate of 30
Mbit/s, while 60 Mbit/s is delivered in a large fraction of the coverage area.

In practice, the propagation losses are not only distant-dependent, but also affected by
other large-scale effects, such as shadowing. The properties described above remain
nevertheless. Coherent precoding from a base station with many antennas can greatly
improve the data rates for the cell edge users, since only the desired signal power (and not
the interference power) is increased. Higher transmit power or smaller cells will only lead
to an interference-limited regime where the cell-edge performance remains to be poor. A
practical challenge with coherent precoding is that the base station needs to learn the user
channels, but reciprocity-based Massive MIMO provides a scalable solution to that. That is
why Massive MIMO is the key technology for delivering ubiquitous connectivity in 5G.








Post navigation
 PREVIOUS POSTField Tests of FDD Massive MIMONEXT POSTSummer School on Signal Processing for
5G
2 THOUGHTS ON “IMPROVING THE CELL-EDGE PERFORMANCE”
1. Kolani illa
MARCH 3, 2017 AT 12:16 PM

The post is interesting, I appreciate it. Now how can we estimate the cost of using massive
mimo in terms of space, in other words will implementing massive MIMO not be
challenging in small platform base stations?
REPLY

1. Emil Björnson
MARCH 3, 2017 AT 10:48 PM

It all depends on how many antennas you want to deploy, at what frequency, and what
the maximum form factor is. But Massive MIMO is certainly feasible at cellular
frequencies, such as 1-5 GHz. You can read more about this in “Myth 1” in the paper:

Emil Björnson, Erik G. Larsson, Thomas L. Marzetta, “Massive MIMO: Ten Myths and One
Critical Question,” IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 114-123, February
2016.