Performance Evaluation of 5G Millimeter-Wave Cellular Access Networks Using a Capacity-Based Network Deployment Tool

The next fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication networks comes with a set of new features to satisfy the demand of data-intensive applications: millimeter wave frequencies, massive antenna arrays, beamforming, dense cells, etc. In this paper, we investigate the use of beamforming techniques through various architectures and evaluate the performance of 5G wireless access networks, using a capacity-based network deployment tool. This tool is proposed and applied to a realistic area in Ghent, Belgium, to simulate realistic 5G networks that respond to the instantaneous bit rate required by the active users. The results show that, with beamforming, 5G networks require almost 15% more base stations and 4 times less power to provide more capacity to the users and same coverage performances, in comparison with the 4G reference network. Moreover, they are 3 times more energy efficient than the 4G network and the hybrid beamforming architecture appears to be a suitable architecture for beamforming to be considered when designing a 5G cellular network.