Capacity Planning in Wideband Cellular Networks

Abstract The performance of any cellular mobile networks is determined by the coverage and capacity. This paper deals with the coverage and capacity issues of upcoming 3G (Third Generation) UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems). UMTS uses WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) as the radio transmission technology. The WCDMA is interference limited, and this leads to a scenario where more users are admitted into the network the cell size shrinks. Therefore coverage and capacity planning is done simultaneously. It is observed that the capacity depends on different parameters such as energy per bit noise spectral density ratio, voice activity, inter cell interference and intra cell interference, etc. the coverage depends on frequency, chip rate, bit rate, mobile maximum power, MS antenna gain, EIRP, interference margin, noise figure etc. Different parameters that influence the capacity and coverage of UMTS cellular network are simulated using MATLAB. The outputs of simulations shows that number of users decreases for higher bit rates, noise rise increases with increasing number of users( or throughput). And also for a given number of users (or throughput) the noise rise increases with interference factor.