Analysis of the Impact of TD-LTE on mobile broadband

Abstract: The mobile broadband services have developed rapidly over the years, becoming critical revenue components of operator business. To accommodate users' growing interests on mobile broadband services and applications, global operators have tried to reorganize their former voice-centered networks by focusing more on the reinforcement of mobile data network performances and capacities. TD-LTE, as one of the emerging powers for the mobile broadband solutions, has gained global attentions and momentums. Different from previous work about the technical evaluations or market predictions, the thesis aims to provide a techno-economic analysis to TD-LTE system, linking its technological characters to the market opportunities and implementation strategies. In order to help TD-LTE operators identify the profit potentials of the system, the services and applications that TD-LTE could enable are discussed together with the analysis of the terminal developments, which are critical to end users' acceptance of TD-LTE. The network deployment strategies are examined and the methods of implementing a decent TD-LTE mobile data network are analyzed with cost efficiency considerations. The analysis find out that the availability of spectrum resource are of most importance for the adoption of TD-LTE technology and the sustainable growth of TD-LTE business relies on the differentiation strategy of services and applications. The feasibility study shows that TD-LTE could enable varied network deployment scenarios, including integrated network solution with legacy networks, and convergent network solution with LTE FDD. The cost analysis find out site infrastructure sharing is beneficial for cost reduction during a national level rollout, especially when the traffic volume increases. Reusing the coverage and capacity of legacy network is mostly effective in the initial phase, and TD-LTE deployment pace should accord with the data prediction on the live network. For compact and indoor scenarios, TD-LTE femto could be a cost effective alternative for mobile broadband access, however the bottleneck of the solution is the limitation on the number of concurrent connections for each femtocell.