Indoor planning optimization of ultra-dense cellular networks at high carrier frequencies

Cellular communications have witnessed an exponential growth over the last few years. The challenges the industry faces for the next decade arise the need for significant changes, i.e., new paradigms away from just incremental advances in the current technologies. Network densification and high frequency communications are widely-recognized as cornerstones of this revolution. Understanding the needs of the market and identify key scenarios are also of paramount importance. Without a doubt, indoor coverage, concentrating a significant part of the demand, deserves special attention due to its strategic importance and technical issues. This paper makes a contribution in this field by introducing a novel framework for indoor planning of dense cellular networks based on millimeter Waves (mmW), a promising approach to provide extremely high data rates to indoor users according to the expectations of the future fifth generation (5G). Thus, by taking advantage of these two paradigms, the proposed planning framework, based on multiobjective optimization and ray-tracing techniques, succeeds in providing effective means to determine near-optimal network configurations that are both scenario-specific and optimized for arbitrary service demand distributions. The results show that such topologies provide the best tradeoff among several conflicting performance indicators, such as capacity, network cost, and cell-edge performance.