A Case Study on the Designing and Planning of LTE Radio Access Network using Atoll

Abstract

To cater large number of mobile users along with new applications and gadgets, higher speed and capacity is required in the networks. To overcome this hunger 3GPP (a collaborative group of Telecommunication Standards bodies) has introduced a new high speed and lower latency radio access technology called as Long Term Evolution (LTE). This is the fourth generation technology as specified by 3GPP standards which can support from 1.4MHz channel bandwidth to 20MHz channel bandwidth along with peak DL Throughput of 100Mbps and 50Mbps in Uplink. The motive of this project work is to design, simulate and analyze the LTE radio system. Previously the networks designed by telecommunication researchers like 1G/2G/3G didn’t make pace with the growing trends and demands so the need of LTE (4G) was fulfilled. Now regarding the radio network planning point of view, lots of software and tools are developed such as Atoll, Asset, Mentum Planet etc. but in this thesis we have used Atoll. Basically Radio access network planning can be defined as the phenomenon of proposing and suggesting new network nodes to be deployed in various areas along with the certain configuration setting for establishing a network. In this study we have selected some part of Khatai district of Baku City of Azerbaijan to plan and design a LTE network by providing simulations of coverage by signal level, coverage by signal-to-noise-ratio and coverage by DL Throughput.

Keywords: LTE, Long Term Evolution, Radio Network Planning, Planning Tool, Coverage Prediction, Cost 231-Hata Propagation Model,  evolved-NodBs (eNBs)