An Experimental Study of Advanced Receivers in a Practical Dense Small Cells Network.

5G is targeting a peak data rate in the order of 10 Gb/s and at least 100 Mb/s data rate is generally expected to be available everywhere. For fulfilling such 5G broadband targets, massive deployment of small cells is considered as one of the promising solutions. However, intercell interference leads to significant limitations on the network throughput in such deployments. In addition, network densification introduces difficulty in network deployment. This paper presents a study on the benefits of advanced receiver in a practical uncoordinated dense small cells deployment. Our aim is to show that advanced receivers can alleviate the need for detailed cell planning. To this end we adopt a hybrid simulation evaluation approach where propagation data are obtained from experimental analysis, and by which we analyse how MIMO constellation and network size impacts to the aim. The experimental data have been obtained using a software defined radio (SDR) testbed network with 12 testbed nodes, configured as either access point or user equipment. Each node features a 4 x 4 or a 2 x 2 MIMO configuration. The results demonstrate that advanced receivers with a larger MIMO antenna configuration significantly improves the throughput performance in a practical dense small cells network due to the interference suppression capability. In addition, the results prove that the operators can rely on uncoordinated deployment of small cells, since the resulting interference can be suppressed by the advanced receiver processing with sufficiently capable MIMO antenna configuration.