Performance analysis of dense small cell networks with practical antenna heights under Rician fading

In this paper, we examine the combined impacts of distance-dependent Rician fading channel model and the absolute difference between the heights of base station (BS) and user equipment (UE) antennas on the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency in an interference-limited ultra-dense (UD) small cell network (SCN). Exploiting distance dependent models for both path loss and multi-path fading, we show that in interference-limited UD-SCNs, Rician fading with variant Rician K factor aggravates the performance loss caused by the difference between the heights of the BS and UE antennas in comparison to Rayleigh fading. In particular, we demonstrate that due to presence of the specular LOS component in the Rician fading, both the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency experience a more steep decline towards zero as the BS density increases. Our performance analysis has a prominent impact on the deployment of UD-SCNs in the 5th-generation of mobile networks, as it indicates that the right modelling of multi-path fading makes a significant difference when assessing the performance of UD-SCNs with non-identical UE-BS antenna heights.