4.

1 Introduction: [1]
Capacity planning gives an estimate of the resources
needed for supporting a specified offered traffic with a
certain level of QoS (e.g. throughput or blocking
probability).
Theoretical capacity of the network is limited by the
number of eNodeBs 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.
Link Budget (Coverage Planning) gives the maximum
allowed path loss and the maximum range of the cell,
whereas coverage Planning takes into account the
interference by providing a suitable model.
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.
In LTE, the main indicator of capacity is SINR distribution in
the cell. In this study, for the sake of simplicity, LTE access
network is assumed to be limited in coverage by UL
direction and capacity by DL.
The evaluation of capacity needs the following two tasks
to be completed:
Being able to estimate the cell throughput
corresponding to the settings used to derive the cell
radius
Analysing the traffic inputs provided by the operator to
derive the traffic demand, which include the amount of
subscribers, the traffic mix and data about the
geographical spread of subscribers in the deployment
area.
In LTE radio network planning, aside from the coverage
planning, factors of capacity are also considered. I.e., the

radio resources needed to maximally support users with a

certain level of QoS (e.g. throughput or blocking
probability, transfer delay).[2]
In LTE system model, it is known that for sustainable endto-end communication among UEs the planning of air
interface has to be well thought-out. The air interface
determines the radio resource each UE can get. The higher
the air interface utilization, the lower will be the average
UE throughput as a result of the congestion over the air
interface. Thus, in order to estimate the cell performance,
we need to model this to properly plan the capacity factor.
[2]
For the case of simplicity the process of LTE capacity
planning is sub-divided in to two as: [2]
Estimating a single eNB capacity which is done using
either SNIR distribution or traffic analysis;
Estimating the average number of mobile users/
Subscribers that can be served in a cell.
Capacity Definition:
The number of connections that the wireless channel can support without
unduly degrading the data services carried on the channel. [3]
The Number of sites due to Capacity:

 operator subscriber density depends on:

population density
mobile phone penetration
operator market share.
traffic forecast should be done by analysing the offered
busy hour traffic per subscriber for different services in
each rollout phase.
traffic data :
voice:
o Erlang per subscriber during of the network.
o codec bit rate ,voice activity
video call:
o Erlang per subscriber during busy hour of the
network
o service bit rates.
NRT data :
o Average throughput (kbps) per
during busy hour of the network.
o Target bit rates.

subscriber

 Traffic model:
The main purpose of traffic model is to describe the
average subscriber behaviour during the most loaded day
period (the Busy Hour).
Total Offered Traffic:
Average Data Rate per Subcriber = Average Data Volume
per Subscriber per BH (bit) /3600 s
Total Offered Traffic = Number of Subscribers*Average
Data Rate per Subscribe.
The site capacity could be derived from the cell
capacity:
Site Capacity:
Site Capacity =Cell Capacity *Number of Cells per Site.
The number of sites due to capacity:
# Sites due to Capacity =Roundup (Total Offered Traffic/
Site Capacity).
The LTE Cell Capacity (Throughput) depends on:
Cell Range (Pathloss):

4.2 Cell capacity estimation procedure:

To fine the cell capacity we do the following steps:
Step 1: To obtain the Spectral Efficiency (SE) figures
for specific ISD (Inter-site distance) and channel bandwidth
interpolation is needed:
SE = interpolate_SE (ISD, channel_bandwidth)

Step 2: Calculate the cell throughput (C) from the

spectral efficiency (SE) taking into account the cell
bandwidth:
C = SE x channel_bandwidth
Step 3: MIMO gain is applied in case of 2 TX antennas at
eNB
C = C x (1 + MIMO_gain(ISD))
Step 4: Spectral efficiency figures have been simulated
for 100% load case. It is needed to scale them according
to the resource utilization and inter-cell interference level
C = C x load x scaling_factor(load)

Table (4.11) The impact of the cell load on the cell

throughput can be summarized by applying scaling factor
.for different ISDs and different cell load

Reference:
[1] Dimensioning of LTE Network
[2] Bethelhem Seifu
[3] 211384749-Lte-Coverage-and-Capacity-Dimensioning
[4] Air_Interface_Dimensioning