Techno-Economical Comparison of Dynamic DAS and Legacy Macrocellular Densification: Capacity and Cost-Efficiency Analysis of Alternative Deployment Solutions for Outdoor Service Provisioning

In order to support anywhere and anytime services of Beyond 4G networks, new deployment solutions will be required that can cost-effectively address the capacity demand of the future and also offer consistently high bit rates and decent quality of service throughout the network coverage area. In this article we look into an advanced outdoor distributed antenna system (DAS) concept, dynamic DAS, that offers on-demand outdoor capacity in urban areas by dynamically configuring the remote antenna units to either act as individual small cells or distributed nodes of a common central cell. The performance of the investigated DAS solution is evaluated and compared with legacy macrocellular deployment in a dense urban environment. Furthermore, the analysis covers the performance evaluation, mainly from an outdoor perspective. The obtained results indicate superior performance of dynamic DAS concept in terms of coverage and SINR, network capacity and cost-efficiency as compared to legacy macrocellular network deployments.