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Considerations of Call Model and Smartphone Penetration Growth for LTE Network Plan

Here I write about some small topic for LTE network plan which including Call Model and Smartphone Penetration Growth Considerations, Scheduler Selection, Indoor Coverage Requirement and Cell Edge Throughput Requirement.

Considerations of Call Model and Smartphone Penetration Growth for LTE Network Plan

The arrival of Smartphone has introduced a whole new trend in data applications and hence resource usage condition. There is now a much bigger data requirement especially in short and bursting traffic. As a result, some networks are seeing single smart-phone user consuming up to 14 times network resources normally consumed by traditional non smart phone user.

Depending on the network morphologies weighting, final site count will also be affected as it would be unwise to assume high data traffic usage uniformly across the entire network. It is likely high data usage traffic be concentrated around dense urban and urban area while Rural and Highway area will consist of lower than average data user. By assigning appropriate data user model inside planning tool, different usage behavior should be simulated accordingly.

Other important questions to be considered before finalizing the network plan are,

  • How much spare capacity the network has to tackle the growth and change in subscriber’s usage without adding extra equipment?
  • How well data hot spots (e.g. big shopping mall, major pedestrian walkways, major stadium and other high profile locations) are covered? Do they have dedicated cell coverage?
  • How much penetration margin is provided for indoor coverage? Indoor user will be a major factor for interference generation to other users due to the higher power requirement.
  • Any major driver for surprise usage increase in the near future? (e.g. Government legislation to improve rural/suburban usage, home DSL replacement package, shutting down of existing data network and migrating users to new LTE networks)

Scheduler Selection

Radio design engineer can choose between different data transmission schedulers in the OSS database depending on the likely radio performance of the network. Normally, PF scheduling is preferred but Max C/I scheduling will give the best throughput for a network with solid coverage.

Indoor Coverage Requirement

Operator coverage expectation will have a direct impact on link budget considerations for both indoor penetration requirement and standard deviation. The final requirement of site count will thereby be directly impacted.

Nevertheless, at important indoor locations such as lobbies of major hotels, popular sport stadium, subway stations and airports, there is always a need of indoor microcell and operator is normally quite willingness to pay for the extra coverage. On the other hand, operator may have difficulties in accessing certain buildings or shopping malls so these areas may need to be covered by outdoor eNodeBs which will increase the penetration requirement.

Cell Edge Throughput Requirement

The final requirement of Uplink and Downlink throughput requirement at cell edge has to come from operator and is directly related to their pricing as well as branding. Sometimes, the edge throughput requirement is also a result of special government legislation on Operator.

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