Estimation of the number of base stations in IS-95 and WCDMA uplink using cell breathing process

Abstract

In this thesis, we propose a new algorithm for finding the cell coverage, Cell Breathing Process, which searches the optimal radius of a cell as computing interference power received at the base station iteratively. The cell radius is considerably reduced as compared with the initial cell radius obtained from a simple link budget calculation. In this process, we also consider the link budget differences among the cellular band (near 800 MHz), PCS band (near 1.8 GHz) and WCDMA band (near 2 GHz) for three types of environment, urban, suburban and rural. Particularly, the multi-layer cell structure is introduced for describing the mixed traffic of speech and data in the WCDMA. The estimation of the number of base stations is derived from the practical information about the area and the number of subscribers in each region. Numerical results show that, when we take the link budget differences by region and frequency band into account, differences of the number of base stations between cellular and PCS bands decrease. In addition, much more base stations are required for WCDMA service due to the data traffic with high bit rates. It is also observed that, as the portion of data traffic increases, the cell coverage gets to be reduced. We have demonstrated that the proposed method works reasonably well for the network dimensioning based on CDMA. The results of estimation may be sufficient references for the detailed cell planning.