The Capacity of Multicellular Distributed Antenna Networks

Distributed antenna systems (DAS) are being widely considered for state-of-the art cellular communication systems to cover dead spots. Recent academic studies have shown that in addition to coverage improvements, DAS can also allow a capacity improvement. This paper provides a generalized information theoretic analysis of downlink multicell DAS for two different transmission strategies: selection diversity (where just one of the distributed antennas are used) and blanket transmission (where all antennas in the cell broadcast data). Simple repeaters are a special case of our analysis. The results show that DAS reduces other-cell interference in a multicell environment and hence significantly improves performance and capacity (by about 2-3x), with particularly large improvements for users near cell boundaries.