Performance of antenna tilting and beamforming in an urban macrocell

In this paper we investigate the use of very high gain antenna columns (up to twelve stacked 8dBi elements) in an urban macro-cell. We also investigate electrical downtilt, and horizontal beamforming using an array of very high gain antenna columns. In particular we investigate simultaneous beamforming and electrical downtilt. The results show that the vertical gain is close to the theoretical frees-space gain, while electrical downtilt increases the effective path-loss slope. Interestingly, the electrical downtilt also increases the azimuth RMS-angle-spread and thereby decreases the horizontal gain achievable with beamforming.