Recent Advances in Image, Audio and Signal Processing

Long Term Evolution Network Planning and Performance Measurement

I. EL-FEGHI
University of Tripoli
Facility of Engineering
Tripoli, Libya
idrise@ee.edu.ly

ZAKARIA SULIMAN ZUBI

A.JAMIL
Computer Science Department University of Tripoli
Faculty of Science
Facility of Engineering
Sirte University, Sirte, Libya
Tripoli, Libya
zszubi@su.edu.ly
a.jameel.m@gmail.com,

H. ALGABROUN
University of Tripoli
Facility of Engineering
Tripoli, Libya
hazgab@yahoo.com

Abstract:- Data communication is growing rapidly, to keep pace with the increasing demands being placed on mobile radio systems, an improved standard was created by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) referred
to as Long Term Evolution (LTE) that provides higher throughputs and lower latencies. LTE brings many technical
benefits to cellular networks and improves the spectral efficiency in 3G networks, allowing carriers to provide
more data and voice services over a given bandwidth. In this work, a detailed LTE radio network dimensioning
procedure including frequency, coverage and capacity analysis has been performed in order to prepare a radio
planning guideline considering possible network implementation in the city of Tripoli/Libya. At the end, the link
level of the LTE network is simulated for both scenarios Uplink and Downlink, to get a closer view to the impact of
the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) on Bit Error Rate (BER) and Block Error Rate (BLER).
Keywords: Long term Evolution, throughputs, latencies, coverage and capacity, SNR, Block Error Rate(BLER)
that LTE radio network planning work just like other
cellular technologies, initial stage planning is normally
guided by various industries and vendors at their own
discretion. They aren't likely to disclose their advancements and findings. That makes the job even more
challenging. Whenever new cellular technology is considered for mass deployment hundreds of its RF parameters go through tuning process with a view to find
out optimum value. But this phase is time consuming
and very costly. So, before commercial deployment if
extensive simulation can be run this tuning phase can
be facilitated in numerous ways. Cost can also be
greatly minimized. That is the benefit of running simulation before mass commercial deployment. In Libya,
LTE is expected to be commercially launched in Q2 of
2014. All these aim at proper radio network planning of
LTE. So, looking for optimizing the vital parameters in
the least possible time is a very challenging issue which
will obviously help network operators in a greater extent.

1. Introduction
LTE is a set of enhancements to the Universal Mobile
Telecommunications System (UMTS) which was introduced in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
Release 8. The main advantages with LTE are high
throughput, low latency, plug and play, FDD and TDD
in the same platform, an improved end-user experience
and a simple architecture resulting in low operating
costs. LTE downlink transmission scheme is based on
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access
(OFDMA) which converts the wide-band frequency
selective channel into a set of many at fading subchannels. The LTE specification provides downlink
peak rates of at least 100 Mbps, an uplink of at least 50
Mbps and RAN round-trip times of less than 10ms.
LTE supports scalable carrier bandwidths, from 1.4
MHz to 20 MHz and supports both frequency division
duplexing (FDD) and time division duplexing (TDD).
LTE will also support seamless passing to cell towers
with older network technology such as GSM,
CDMAOne, W-CDMA (UMTS), and CDMA2000. The
next step for LTE evolution is LTE Advanced and is
currently being standardized in 3GPP Release 10
[1][2][3].

The ultimate objective of this work is to come

up with the detailed radio network planning guideline
with respect to Tripoli city. With this mission ahead, in
this paper a step by step method was followed starting
from gathering preplanning information which went up
to coverage and capacity analysis. For this, the link
level simulation had to be performed and link budget
had to be prepared. All these have been presented here.

Radio network planning is a very vital step for

a wireless communication technology. As standardization work of LTE is approaching the end line, it's high
time to go for efficient radio network planning guideline for LTE. For the same reason, along with the fact

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Recent Advances in Image, Audio and Signal Processing

Prior to that, a brief description of radio network planning methodology has been given.
2. Radio Network Planning Process
Radio Network Planning contains number of phases: 1)
Site survey-which includes collection of pre-planning
information that will be used in the Link Budget preparation and Coverage and Capacity planning calculations. 2) Frequency and spectrum planning- in this
phase a variety of parameters' values will be chosen,
and according to these parameters the rest of the calculation is processed. 3) Link Budget and Coverage planning, and 4) Capacity planning- these two steps involve
propagation model tuning, defining thresholds from
Link budget, creating detailed radio plan based on the
thresholds, checking network capacity against more
detailed traffic estimates, and configuration planning.

2.3 Link Budget and Coverage Planning

The link budget calculations estimate the maximum
allowed signal attenuation, called path loss, between
the mobile and the base station antenna. The maximum
path loss allows the maximum cell range to be estimated with a suitable propagation model, such as
Cost231Hata model. The cell range gives the number
of base station sites required to cover the target geographical area. The link budget calculation can also be
used to compare the relative coverage of the different
systems.
2.3.1 Procedure
Link budget and coverage planning is calculated for
each scenario separately, for both cases "UL & DL".
The procedure steps are [4]:

2.1 Site Survey

The city of Tripoli is located in the North West of the
country on the coasted area and centered by longitude
line of 13119"E and at latitude line of 32548"N,
with population of 2,2 00,000 and having an average
building height of 20 meters. The area of Tripoli is
517.6 km2. In this network design, Tripoli has been
divided into four main sections according to the population distribution over the city. These sections are
dense urban, urban, suburban, and rural areas. Dense
urban is 30.4 km2, Urban is 116.4 km2, and Suburban
is 370.8 km2. (Source : HUAWEI ICT Company
Libya Branch Office, Date: Jan/2013).

Step 1: Calculate the Max Allowed Path Loss

(MAPL) for DL and UL.
Step 2: Calculate the DL and UL cell radiuses
by the propagation model equation and the
MAPL.
Step 3: Determine the appropriate cell radius
by balancing the DL and UL radiuses.
Step 4: Calculate the site coverage area and
the required sites number.

2.4 Capacity Planning

With a rough estimation of the cell size and sites count,
verification of coverage analysis is carried out for the
required capacity. It is verified whether with the given
sites density, the system can carry the specified load or
new sites have to be added. Theoretical capacity of the
network is limited by the number of eNBs installed in
the network. Cell capacity in LTE is impacted by several factors, which includes interference level, packet
scheduler implementation and supported modulation
and coding schemes [4][5]. Link Budget (Coverage
Planning) gives the maximum allowed path loss and
the maximum range of the cell, whereas takes into account the interference by providing a suitable model.
LTE also exhibits soft capacity like its predecessor 3G
systems. Therefore, the increase in interference and
noise by increasing the number of users will decrease
the cell coverage forcing the cell radius to become
smaller.
The evaluation of capacity needs the following two
tasks to be completed [4]:

Figure 1 The division of Tripoli, Dense urban is

the red area, Urban is the yellow area, Suburban is
the green area

2.2 Frequency and Spectrum Planning

In this section, the spectrum is managed; the available
frequency band is chosen to be the frequency band for
LTE network, the bandwidth, duplex mode, SFR, and
Cyclic Prefix are specified also:
Frequency band of 1800 MHz is used.
System bandwidth is 20 MHz.

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The duplex mode is FDD.

Soft frequency reuse of (SFR 1*3*1) is used.
Cyclic prefix is chosen to be normal.

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Recent Advances in Image, Audio and Signal Processing

Being able to estimate the cell throughput corresponding to the settings used to derive the cell radius.
Analyzing the traffic inputs provided by the operator to derive the traffic demands, which includes
the number of subscribers, the traffic mix and data
about the geographical spread of subscribers in the
deployment area.

2.4.1

TABLE 1 Input parameters for each scenario

Morphology
Ch. type
Ch. Model
MIMO

Procedure

Cell Edge
Rate
(kbps)
MCS

Capacity planning procedure is as follows:

Step 1: calculate the total average throughput
per subscriber (UL+DL).
Step 2: calculate the average throughput per
subscriber for both UL &DL.
Step 3: calculate the peak and average
throughput per site for both UL &DL.
Step 4: determine the maximum number of
subscribers per site by calculating the number
of subscribers for both UL &DL and taking the
lowest one.
Step 5: calculate total sites number required
for each scenario.

Urban

Suburban

UL
DL
ETU 3

UL
DL
ETU 60

UL
DL
ETU 120

1
2
256

2
2
1024

1
2
256

2
2
1024

1
2
256

2
2
1024

QPS
K
3/4

QPS
K
1/2

QPS
K
3/4

QPS
K
1/2

QPS
K
3/4

QPS
K
1/2

In order to calculate the MAPL; the EIRP, MRRSS,

Extra Gain, and Extra Margin and Loss must be calculated first as follows:
EIRP = Max Tx Power + Total Tx Gain - Total Tx Loss
MRRSS = Rx Sensitivity Total Rx Gain + Total Rx
Loss
Extra Gain=Hard Handoff Gain+ MIMO Gain + Other
Gain
Extra Margin & Loss = Shadow Fading Margin +
Penetration Loss + Other Loss.

3. Radio Planning Analysis and Results for

Tripoli City
Tripoli is the capital of Libya and it is considered an
overpopulated city compared to the rest of most of the
country. Efficient radio network planning is obviously a
big challenge here with the optimal utilization of limited resources. In this part of the work, coverage analysis along with link budget preparation and capacity
analysis have been performed. Calculations have been
made specifically for Tripoli city. As a result, it can be
included for a complete Tripoli city radio network
planning, the simulations with a planning tool like
Atoll. But this part is here now considered to be the
potential future work.

The results are shown in the table 2.

TABLE 2 EIRP, MRRSS, Extra Gain, and Extra
Margin and Loss results.
Morphology
Channel
type
EIRP per
Sub (dBm)
MRRSS
(dBm)

3.1 Link Budget and Coverage Planning Analysis

Extra Gain
(dB)
Extra
Margin &
Loss (dB)

Maximum Allowed Path Loss (MAPL) has different

values for dense urban, urban and suburban (UL &
DL). So the calculation must be done to every condition and scenario apart, and from these results the cell
radius can be calculated for each case. At the end, the
minimum cell radius from UL& DL cell radiuses is
chosen for each scenario. There are three different cell
radiuses, each scenario has its own cell radius.
The basic input parameters are as shown in table 1.

ISBN: 978-960-474-350-6

Dense urban

Dense urban

Urban

Suburban

UL

DL

UL

DL

UL

DL

6.19

6.19
141.
2
12

28.6
8
121.
3
9

6.19

145.1
8
12

29.1
8
123.
3
9

140.
9
12

28.6
8
122.
1
9

28.43

38.2

23.0

32.8

13.8

23.5

Then the MAPL is calculated by this equation:

MAPL=EIRP - MRRSS + Extra Gain - Extra Margin
& Loss

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Recent Advances in Image, Audio and Signal Processing

MAPL values for each scenario are shown in table 3.

3.2 Capacity Planning Analysis
Three types of service packages are provided, golden
service package, silver service package, and bronze
service package, each service has its own quality the
month service package, the DL and UL peak data rates,
and the package percentage- all of these characteristics
are shown in table 5.

TABLE 3 MAPL values for each scenario

Morphology
Ch. type
MAPL (dB)

Dense urban
UL
DL
122.9 124.0

Urban
UL
DL
124.4 127.0

Suburban
UL
DL
133.3 137.0

The traffic ratio of the UL and DL in terms of the total

traffic is chosen to be 20% for UL and 80% for DL.
The number of subscribers must be specified in order to
continue the analysis, the subscribers number for Dens
Urban is considered to be 500,000, for Urban 300,000,
and for Sub Urban 200,000, so that the total number of
subscribers is 1,000,000.

Using Cost231-Hata model equations, the maximum

distance between the terminal and the base station is
calculated, which is the cell radius.
Total = L (HSS) + Cm
L = 46.3 + 33.9 log( f ) + 13.82 log(HBS ) + (44.9 6.55 log(HSS )) log(d)
(Hss) = 3.2[log (11.75 )Hss]^2 - 4.97
areas

TABLE 5 The different provided services

For Urban

(Hss) = [1.1log (f) - 0.7]Hss - [1.56log(f) - 0.8]

Suburban or Rural areas

Data
card
package
Type
Gold
Sliver
Bronze

For

The resulted cell radiuses after the balancing are shown

in Table 4.

Cell Radius
(Km)

Dense
urban
0.33

Urban Suburban
0.46

DL
peak
rate
kb/s
2048
2048
1024

UL
peak
rate
kb/s
1024
512
256

Package
percentage
10%
50%
40%

Firstly the total average throughput per subscriber must

be calculated in order to calculate the average throughput per site.
Avg. throughput per sub in BH (DL+UL) (Kbps) =
Month service package Usage ratio for service pack-

TABLE 4 Cell Radius values for each scenario

Morphology

Month
service
package
(GB)
20
15
10

1.49

age

BH convergence ratio 1000

1000
Total avg. throughput per sub in BH = (Avg.
throughput per sub in BH (DL+UL) packet percentage)

After determining the cell radius for each scenario, sites

number and sites coverage areas are calculated by the
equations below:
Site coverage area =

TABLE 6 Total average throughput per subscriber in

BH

Required sites number =

Dense Urban:
Site Cov. Area = 0.2122 km2, Required Sites No. =
144 site
Urban:
Site Cov. Area = 0.412 km2, Required Sites No. = 283
site
Sub Urban:
Site Cov. Area = 4.326 km2, Required Sites No. = 86
site

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Data card
package Type
Gold
Sliver
Bronze
Total

174

Average throughput
/user in BH
(Kbps)(DL+UL)
88.89
66.67
44.44
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Recent Advances in Image, Audio and Signal Processing

Total sites number =

Avg. throughput per subscriber for UL = Total avg.

throughput per sub (UL +DL)
UL traffic ratio
Avg. throughput per subscriber for DL = Total avg.
throughput per sub (UL +DL)
DL traffic ratio

Table 7 shows the results of Average throughput per

subscriber calculation for each (UL &DL).

TABLE 7 Average throughput per subscriber for UL

& DL
Chanel
Type

Total avg.
throughput per
sub (UL +DL)
(Kbps)

Traffic
ratio

UL
DL

62.91
62.91

20%
80%

Dense Urban:
Total sites number = 215 site
Urban:
Total sites number = 129 site
Sub Urban:
Total sites number = 86 site

The required sites number for a specific area should be

chosen to be the maximum number of sites obtained
from coverage and capacity planning calculations to
satisfy the traffic requirements of both coverage and
capacity; according to the results obtained from the
coverage and capacity planning analysis, the final sites
number required for each scenario are shown in table 9.

Avg.
throughput
per subscriber
(Kbps)
12
48

TABLE 9 The final required sites number for each

scenario

Then the peak and average throughputs per site for both
UL and DL must be calculated.

Scenario

Peak throughput per site =(data RE/sec bits per RE

MIMO effect coding rate)
Average throughput per site = (peak throughput
per modulation scheme sub number percentage)

Dense
urban
Urban
Suburban

Required Sites
Number
215
283
86

The average throughput per site is shown in table 8.

4. PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT FOR THE
LINK LEVEL OF AN LTE NETWORK

TABLE 8 Average throughput per site

DL
Avg. throughput per site
(Mbps)

11
2

The performance of the link level and communication

quality in terms of bit error rate (BER) or block error
rate (BLER) can be expressed as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), or the signal to-interference
ratio (SIR), depending on which type of signal disturbance is dominant. In digital transmission, the number
of bit errors is the number of received bits of a data
stream over a communication channel that have been
altered due to noise, interference, distortion or bit synchronization errors.
In this section a simulation of the channels between the
transmitter (eNB or UE) and the receiver (eNB or UE)
is done to know how the BER and BLER are related to
the SNR, also to get a clear view to the spectrum of the
transmitted signal, at the transmitter and the receiver.
To perform this simulation, ADS2009 (Advanced Design System 2009) simulation program is used.

U
L
40

Now, the maximum subscribers number per site is calculated for UL and DL and the lowest is chosen.
Max Sub No. per site =

Max Sub number per site (DL) = 2333 sub/site

Max Sub number per site (UL) =3333 sub/site
Then the total number of sites according to the capacity
planning analysis is calculated.

4.1 Downlink(DL) with FDD propagation mode, at

the receiver(Rx)

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Some cases are illustrated in this paper. For the first

case, the channel between the transmitter (eNB) and the
receiver (UE) is simulated for DL scenario, the propagation mode applied is FDD, and all the results are
taken at the receiver (UE) end. The plots that include

radio network taking into consideration the possibility

of maintaining the current 3G network at the very low
populated areas the rural areas. The outcome as
shown in fig.4 of the network planning design is as
follows:
The peak throughput/site for the DL is 144 Mbps.
The peak throughput/site for the UL is 50.4 Mbps.
The average throughput/site for the DL is 112
Mbps.
The average throughput/site for the UL is 40
Mbps.
The max. Subs. No./site was found to be 2333
sub/site.

The total sites number for each scenario apart; for

dense urban 215 sites, for urban 283 sites, and for suburban 86 site.

the resulted BER and

BLER and how they affect the SNR are shown in Figure 2.

From the link level -of the LTE network- simulation

cases, we see that as the BER or BLER increases, the
SNR decreases, and vice versa. The relation of
BERvsSNR and BLERvsSNR varies depending on
many parameters such as: modulation scheme, code
rate, channel type, and antenna configuration.
The main observations are summarized in the following
Figure 4. The peak throughputs
points:
From the results it is shown that the BER&BLER
can get improved by increasing the number of receiving antennas (antenna diversity improvement).
The number of transmitting antennas doesnt affect the BER or BLER values.
The resulting BER&BLER from TDD and FDD
simulation cases have the same performance for
the same antenna configuration.
Receiver diversity affects the SNR; SIMO (1x2)
antenna configuration increases the SNR by 3dB
whereas MIMO (2x2) increases the SNR by 4dB.

Figure 2 BER&BLERvsSNR for DL-Fading

4.2 Uplink(UL) with FDD Propagation Mode, at the
Receiver(Rx)
In this case the channel between the transmitter (UE)
and the receiver (eNB) was simulated for UL scenario,
the propagation mode applied is FDD, and the results
are taken at the receiver (eNB) end.
The plots that include the resulted BER and BLER and
how they affect the SNR are shown in Figures 3.

For the future work, its recommended to include the

rest of the country in the network planning, including
the rural areas. Its also highly recommended to use a
planning tool like Atoll, the planning tool will save the
time and effort and will make the calculations more
accurate. Such planning tools are so expensive and
thats why in our work it was impossible to use it.
Figure 3 BER&BLERvsSNR for UL-AWGN

Reference

5. Conclusions

[1] M. Junaid Arshad, Amjad Farooq, Abad Shah,

"Evolution and Development towards 4th Generation

A solution to improve the current communication system in Tripoli city is introduced by designing an LTE

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Recent Advances in Image, Audio and Signal Processing

(4G) Mobile Communication Systems", Journal of

American Science, 2010; 6(12).
[2] Harri Holma, Antti Toskala, "LTE for UMTS
OFDMA and SC-FDMA Based Radio Access", John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd, both of Nokia Siemens Networks,
Finland, 2009.
[3] Ericsson, Long Term Evolution (LTE), an introduction, October 2007.
[4] HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES, Long Term Evolution (LTE) Radio Access Network Planning Guide CO.,
LTD.
[5] Abdul Basit, Syed, Dimensioning of LTE Network,
Description of Models and Tool, Coverage and Capacity Estimation of 3GPP Long Term Evolution radio interface, February 2009.

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