Cost Efficient High Capacity Indoor Wireless Access: Denser Wi-Fi or Coordinated Pico-cellular?

Rapidly increasing traffic demand has forced indoor operators to deploy more and more Wi-Fi access points (APs). As AP density increases, inter-AP interference rises and may limit the capacity. Alternatively, cellular technologies using centralized interference coordination can provide the same capacity with the fewer number of APs at the price of more expensive equipment and installation cost. It is still not obvious at what demand level more sophisticated coordination pays off in terms of total system cost. To make this comparison, we assess the required AP density of three candidate systems for a given average demand: a Wi-Fi network, a conventional pico-cellular network with frequency planning, and an advanced system employing multi-cell joint processing. Numerical results show that dense WiFi is the cheapest solution at a relatively low demand level. However, the AP density grows quickly at a critical demand level regardless of propagation conditions. Beyond this “Wi-Fi network limit”, the conventional pico-cellular network works and is cheaper than the joint processing in obstructed environments, e.g., furnished offices with walls. In line of sight condition such as stadiums, the joint processing becomes the most viable solution. The drawback is that extremely accurate channel state information at transmitters is needed.