Network Capacity, Coverage Estimation and Frequency Planning of 3GPP Long Term Evolution

Abstract: The recent increase of mobile data usage and emergence of new applications such as Online Gaming, mobile TV, Web 2.0, Streaming Contents have greatly motivated the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to work on the Long Term Evolution (LTE). The LTE is the latest standard in the mobile network technology tree. It inherits and develops the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA network technologies and is a step toward the 4th generation (4G) of radio technologies designed to optimize the capacity and speed of 3G mobile communication networks. In this thesis, the LTE system capacity and coverage are investigated and a model is proposed on the base of the Release 8 of 3GPP LTE standards. After that, the frequency planning of LTE is also studied. The results cover the interference limited coverage calculation, the traffic capacity calculation and radio frequency assignment. The implementation is achieved on the WRAP software platform for the LTE Radio Planning.