Impact of Higher Order Horizontal Sectorisation on a Real 4G Long Term Evolution Network

Horizontal sectorisation has always been done irrespective of generations of cellular radio networks for the improvement of coverage and capacity. Generally, commercial deployment is restricted to three sectors due to increased interference. However one of the efficient spectra uses techniques which are explored these days to meet the huge data requirement of Next Generation wireless networks is higherorder sectorisation. Improved antenna design coupled with intelligent beamforming has enhanced the benefits of higherorder sectorisation surpassing the limitations. Performance gains by coverage and capacity are evaluated in this paper with the use of higher-order horizontal sectorisation through simulation and using real network scenario. Simulations have been carried out to assess the potential gain for the idealized Long Term Evaluation -Advanced network model in terms of the considered Key Performance Indicators of the network. The results have also been verified with the help of data obtained from live BSNL 4G network at Gangtok by deploying sites of six sectors to confirm the performance improvement with the use of higher-order sectorisation.