  Capable of significantly reducing cell size and enhancing spatial reuse,
network densification is shown to be one of the most dominant approaches to
expand network capacity. Due to the scarcity of available spectrum resources,
nevertheless, the over-deployment of network infrastructures, e.g., cellular
base stations (BSs), would strengthen the inter-cell interference as well, thus
in turn deteriorating the system performance. On this account, we investigate
the performance of downlink cellular networks in terms of user coverage
probability (CP) and network spatial throughput (ST), aiming to shed light on
the limitation of network densification. Notably, it is shown that both CP and
ST would be degraded and even diminish to be zero when BS density is
sufficiently large, provided that practical antenna height difference (AHD)
between BSs and users is involved to characterize pathloss. Moreover, the
results also reveal that the increase of network ST is at the expense of the
degradation of CP. Therefore, to balance the tradeoff between user and network
performance, we further study the critical density, under which ST could be
maximized under the CP constraint. Through a special case study, it follows
that the critical density is inversely proportional to the square of AHD. The
results in this work could provide helpful guideline towards the application of
network densification in the next-generation wireless networks.
