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Introduction
The objective of a cellular system is to provide quality
communication to the maximum number of users in a defined area.
The number of users supported by the system can be increased by
using more frequencies.
Frequency resources are however always limited.
Hence RF Planning engineers are required to maximise spectrum
efficiency.
In order to accommodate a maximum number of subscribers per
network, the available frequencies need to be reused as often as
possible.
This creates interference towards other cells, which have
detrimental impact to the link quality.
Finding the optimum compromise between dense re-use and least
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interference is the objective of frequency planning.
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Lecture notes
Introduction
The system design and planning of the system has to be done so as
to reuse the frequencies as often as possible while keeping the cochannel and adjacent channel interference within acceptable
limits.
Also a minimum received signal level has to be provided throughout
the coverage area of the network.
Frequency planning can be done
Manually by skilled expert RF Engineers.
With powerful planning tool (here used acronym CellCAD)
having the option of automated frequency planning.
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Propagation loss
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Lecture notes
Pre-design
During pre-design, project leaders study business
planning, a prediction of the number of subscribers,
subscriber usage, target customers, spectrum and
pricing.
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Objectives
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Main phases
Prephase: Preparation (D0)
Initial design: Phase 1 (D1)
Implementation: Phase 2 (D2)
Optimization: Phase 3 (D3)
Ongoing system improvement: Phase 4 (D4)
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Design objectives
Determining our design objectives and
standards is a major step of our design.
We need to know:
How much received power is strong enough?
Where?
How much spectrum or how many channels are
available? Where?
How small a signal to interference ratio is
tolerable? Where?
How much and what kind of demand and growth is
expected?
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Objectives
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CCI objectives
We define different levels of quality
tolerance in different areas.
Typically, we expect to provide better quality
in the downtown area and major highways than
in the outskirts of town.
Coverage objective is the minimum signal
strength that a mobile station requires to
communicate with the base station.
Capacity and interference objectives are sets
of thresholds.
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CCI objectives
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Databases
To perform simulation and design, we need information in databases about the physical
environment, people, and resources in the target area.
CellCAD or corresponding design tools display some of these databases, such
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terrain, in the form of a color map and others, such as antennas, in a table form.
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Antenna database is a table of available antennas with their gains at different angles.
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We can view the antenna gains, horizontal patterns or vertical patterns in CellCAD.
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A structure database contains all the existing structures, i.e., towers and buildings, their
location, ground elevation, and radiation center.
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We will use this database in the site selection stage of coverage design.
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Lecture notes
Model optimization is the process of adjusting our loss prediction model to conform with
measurement data collected through drive tests in the target area.
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Using a correction factor we incorporate the best dB adjustment.
Morphological classification
We classify the target into only three categories
based on land usage:
urban,
suburban, and
rural.
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Lecture notes
Morphological classification
Urban areas have man-made structures and little
vegetation.
Local clutter (obstacles) interferes the line-of-sight (LOS)
from the base stations antenna to mobile stations antenna,
since the radiation center is only slightly higher than the
building heights.
Urban sites have relatively small coverage areas.
Morphological classification
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Correction factors
Morphologically diverse area needs several
correction factors.
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Regions with different morphological characteristics require unique correction factors.
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dB and dBm
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Note: dBm is a unit for power but dB is a unit for power gain or loss.
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EiRP = Effective isotropic Radiating Power, BS = Base Station, MS = Mobile Station
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Coverage classes
The mobile station requires at least a signal strength on the street or at the mobile
stations receiver. To evaluate coverage of a mobile station in a car, we added 10 dB to
the power required on the street. To evaluate coverage of the mobile station in the
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building, we added 20 dB to the power required on the street.
Hand-off window
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Lecture notes
Hand-off window
Switching back and forth between two
stations due to signal level fluctuations
increases the mobiles chances of dropping a
call and overhead signaling to complete a
hand-off.
Therefore, multiple hand-offs (ping-pong
effect) are undesirable.
The hand-off window ensures that the signal
strength of a neighboring station is at least 3
dB stronger than the signal strength of the
serving station before the call is handed off
to the neighboring station.
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Hand-off window
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Lecture notes
After LBA is done and the balanced path is achieved from path loss and the propagation
loss model (e.g. HATAs model) we can estimate the cell radius.
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Note that this method is crude and does not account for the terrain.
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Lecture notes
After running propagation for a site with a typical antenna type, radiation center, and
EiRP in CellCAD, we can plot the signal predictions to use for estimating a cell size.
The coverage threshold plus the hand-off window is the threshold that determines the
cell radius.
Because the cell radius varies in different directions, we take the average of radii409
in
several directions.
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Lecture notes
If the target area is not homogenous in terms of morphology, call traffic demands,
dominant type of phones, and phones environment, we estimate several cell sizes.
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After classifying the areas, we estimate a unique cell size for each area.
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Lecture notes
Coverage Design
In coverage design, we select site locations and
antenna configurations, in a sequential manner, to
provide sufficient signal strength for mobile stations
to communicate in defined areas.
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Topographical maps
Topographical maps show the ground elevation using
contour lines.
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Lecture notes
Coverage design I
For regularity of design, we use a hexagonal grid pattern to guide our selection of sites.
This regularity helps us in the next stages of design, i.e., capacity analysis and 418
frequency planning.
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Special considerations in
coverage design
Areas that are physically far apart may
become close from a propagation viewpoint
because of water enhancement.
The EM loss over water is less than over dry
ground and CellCAD accounts for this
difference.
In site selection, we need to watch for extra
propagation from sites close to water because
the propagation could cause interference.
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Lecture notes
Special considerations in
coverage design: Tilt
During the D1 stage of coverage design, we design sites using one type of omni
antenna placed within a range of heights.
In the D1 stage, we rarely downtilt an antenna because we save time by waiting to
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recommend antenna downtilts during the D2 stage when we have real site locations.
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Lecture notes
Special considerations in
coverage design
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Lecture notes
Propagation in tunnels
Propagation inside tunnels is inhibited because of
excessive loss at obstructions, bends, and corners.
For propagation studies, a tunnel is often modeled as
a smooth-walled, glossy, straight, and homogeneous
wave guide.
For such a model, attenuation varies as the inverse
square of frequency.
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Tunnels
Propagation in tunnels is difficult and special modeling
and design methodology must be used.
In the mobile communications industry, this has
evolved into a specialized domain, with many
techniques including such design approaches as leaky
cables, closely located repeaters, etc.
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Foliage
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Lecture notes
Foliage losses
The effects of foliage are considerable at UHF and
higher frequencies.
Foliage effects vary with seasons, and thus present
special design problems.
Sometimes, significant design alterations are
necessary as the seasons change, thus the term
multi-season design.
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Special considerations in
coverage design: Delay spread
In selecting site locations, we need to look for reflecting
surfaces, i.e., (glass) buildings and (snowcap) mountains, that
create time dispersion.
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Capacity analysis
Objective:
Estimate traffic/channel loading per station
Put additional sites wherever needed
that too heavy traffic load can distribute fairly
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The resulting subscriber density is a map or matrix with the number of subscribers
in
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each bin.
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Traffic parameters
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Traffic parameters
The incoming traffic load is a random process,
therefore, we should employ a probabilistic
model with parameters such as:
Average number of users in the system.
Average amount of delay for each call.
Average total number of subscribers predicted or
planned.
Probability of blocking a call request
System queuing strategy
Call arrival rate
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Subscriber usage
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Erlangs/station
For each station or cell, CellCAD calculates the call traffic in Erlangs by multiplying
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number of subscribers in the cell area by the subscriber usage.
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Traffic models
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Example
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Lecture notes
Limitations
Hardware limitations, spectrum availability, selected reuse
scheme, and zoning issues are inputs that we use to calculate the
maximum number of channels on each station.
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Channel off-loading
Reduce the Coverage Area of Station by:
Reducing its Antenna Height (effective)
Using an Antenna with lower gain (not effective)
Reducing its power output (not effective and not
recommended)
Down tilting (effective, not to be used in D1)
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Lecture notes
Channel off-loading
First, we try to off-load traffic from the overloaded
site to neighbor sites.
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Cell splitting
Second, we try to add a site to off-load traffic from
the overloaded site.
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RF planning
The goal is to achieve optimum use of resources and maximum
revenue potential whilst maintaining a high level of system
quality.
Full consideration must also be given to cost and spectrum
allocation limitations.
A properly planned system should allow capacity to be added
economically when traffic demand increases.
As every urban environment is different, so is every macrocell and
microcell network.
Hence accurate planning is essential in order to ensure that the
system will provide both the increased capacity and the
improvement in network quality where required.
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Lecture notes
RF planning
RF planning plays a critical role in the cellular design
process.
By doing a proper RF planning we can reduce a lot of
problems that we may encounter in the future and also
reduce substantially the cost of optimization.
On the other hand a poorly planned network not only
leads to many network problems , it also increases the
optimization costs and still may not ensure the desired
quality.
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Lecture notes
Frequency planning
How many channels are needed and where?
Station by station reuse penalty?
Exclusion zones?
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Big picture
Interference
analysis
Interference
reduction
Automatic frequency
planning
Manual frequency
planning
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Reuse distance
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Lecture notes
Reuse distance
We increase our system capacity when we decrease
the distance between sites that use the same RF
channel.
Close reuse means small D/R, not small D.
The trade-off to increased capacity is an increase in
interference because the co-channel sites have less
distance between them.
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Reuse patterns
A reuse pattern means that we can use all our spectrum on every
cluster of K sites.
4, 7, 9, and 12 are typical cell reuse patterns.
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C/I
Sectorization
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Smart antenna
Profits
Loss
Gain
Beamwidth
Interference
reduction
Adaptive coverage
Cost
Complexity
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Likely server
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Lecture notes
Likely server
For interference calculations, CellCAD determines the serving
area based on likely server or secondary threshold.
We use interference based on likely server most often.
In a bin for interference based on likely server, CellCAD
1) filters out all stations that do not have a signal strength above
the system threshold before identifying possible servers (>Tsys)
2) identifies station A as a potential server if its signal strengths is
greater than its primary threshold.
3) identifies the best server, the station with the strongest signal
strength, and classifies this station as a potential server.
4) identifies station A as a potential server if its signal strength is
greater than the signal strength from the best server minus station
As hand-off window.
Note, to define the same serving area as likely servers, set the
secondary threshold equal to the secondary threshold for
demographics based on cell hand-off.
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Example
We quantify tolerable interference as a percentage
of all covered bins that can have interference.
Percentage interference
=10/32*100=31%
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Frequency assignment I:
Automatic Frequency Planning
works
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Frequency assignment II
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Model optimization
Model optimization is the process of adjusting
our loss prediction model to conform with
measurement data that are collected through
drive tests in the target area.
As a result of this measurement integration
process, we find a correction factor, the
standard deviation of prediction errors, and a
color plot that shows the value of error at
each point on the drive-test route.
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Measurement integration
Measurement integration for model optimization
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Drive-test plan
After selecting the sites to be drive-tested,
the next step is to formulate a drive test plan
for each site.
The following rules should be observed.
The drive test plan should include both radial and
circumferential routes.
It should also include wide & narrow roads.
It is important that radial roads be drive-tested
till the edge of the cell boundary.
It is beneficial to measure beyond the coverage
contour up to the interference contour of the site.
These contours are based on set threshold values.
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Drive-test plan
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Correction Factor
Every measured point is compared to its
corresponding predicted signal strength and
the error as well as co-ordinates are
recorded in a file in CellCAD.
The model is adjusted by adding a correction
factor to the predicted signal strength
values.
The correction factor to be added is the
average value of the differences between
measured and predicted signal strength
values.
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Correction Factor
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