Universal Mobile Telecommunication System Radio Network Planning for the Case of Addis Ababa City

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Date

2016-02

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

In this research, Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) radio access network planning is demonstrated taking Addis Ababa city as a case study. In this regard, the major planning problem for UMTS network is solved through an approach that makes use of the industry best practices adopted by the major equipment vendors currently working with ethio telecom (the sole telecom operator in Ethiopia), ZTE, Huawei, and Ericson. The main focus of the design research is on the network dimensioning aspect especially the radio link budget, capacity dimensioning and channel element dimensioning. On top of this, primary scrambling code planning is performed in parallel with coverage prediction and capacity simulation to verify the dimensioning outputs. Except for the channel element dimensioning, all the other dimensioning results are less than what the operator is using in its live network. This is achieved through the proper design decision made at each stage of the planning process. On the other hand, the channel element estimation result looks a bit higher as compared to the value used in the live network. But the truth is, knowingly the operator chose to start with minimum channel element resource and plan to purchase more channel element resource as the traffic grows. Hence, the comparison in this regard fails to qualify the current dimension result. In general, the main contributions of this research are two-fold: first it solves planning problem which is case specific to ethio telecom, second it demonstrate particular planning approaches using ethio telecom planning requirements as an input.

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Keywords

Network Planning

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