Indoor TD-LTE small cell deployment study: Benefit of adding cells is not always existing

An indoor network planning for large buildings is studied in this paper, where the cells are continuously added in order to increase the total network capacity. The network capacity performance with varying cell densities has been studied with system-level simulations. The results show that under a particular assumption of traffic load, denser small cells per floor may even degrade the downlink performance due to the higher inter-cell interference. However, the uplink performance can always benefit from the cell densification. This paper can serve as essential guidelines for indoor small cell deployment. It is recommended that careful considerations need to be taken if an operator intends to improve network performance by adding cells to their networks.