  The need to carry out analytical studies of wireless systems often motivates
the usage of simplified models which, despite their tractability, can easily
lead to an overestimation of the achievable performance. In the case of dense
small cells networks, the standard single slope path-loss model has been shown
to provide interesting, but supposedly too optimistic, properties such as the
invariance of the outage/coverage probability and of the spectral efficiency to
the base station density. This paper seeks to explore the performance of dense
small cells networks when a more accurate path-loss model is taken into
account. We first propose a stochastic geometry based framework for small cell
networks where the signal propagation accounts for both the Line-of-Sight (LOS)
and Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) components, such as the model provided by the 3GPP
for evaluation of pico-cells in Heterogeneous Networks. We then study the
performance of these networks and we show the dependency of some metrics such
as the outage/coverage probability, the spectral efficiency and Area Spectral
Efficiency (ASE) on the base station density and on the LOS likelihood of the
propagation environment. Specifically, we show that, with LOS/NLOS propagation,
dense networks still achieve large ASE gain but, at the same time, suffer from
high outage probability.
