Automatic antenna tilt control for capacity
enhancement in UMTS FDD
Magne Pettersen Lars E. Bråten
Radio Access Networks Radio Access Networks
Telenor Research and Development Telenor Research and Development
Fornebu, Norway Fornebu, Norway
Magne.Pettersen@telenor.com Lars-Erling.Braten@telenor.com
Abstract— Simulations were performed to evaluate the effect of
adaptively adjusting the base station antenna vertical tilt angle to
adapt to the current geographical traffic load distribution and
thereby achieve an overall capacity increase in UMTS FDD. The
capacity increase is very dependant on the traffic conditions.
Using a generic 21-cell scenario and positioning three traffic
hotspots within the area with varying position relative to the base
stations, the capacity increase was in the order of 30 per cent on
average at a 99 per cent grade-of-service. The capacity
improvement by using tilt adjustment increases with increasingly
unbalanced traffic, as expected. Automatic tilt control represents
a viable alternative for interference reduction purposes and
thereby provisioning of better overall network capacity during
dynamically changing traffic situations.
Keywords: Antenna tilt control, Monte Carlo simulation, UMTS
FDD
I. INTRODUCTION
The rollout of the Universal Mobile Telecommunication
System (UMTS) is ongoing in a large number of countries and
many have started commercial operation. UMTS is expected to
play an increasingly important role in the future. The capacity
of UMTS frequency division duplex (FDD), employing
WCDMA, is interference limited. Methods for network
interference reduction include adaptive base station (BS)
antennas, multiuser detection and antenna vertical tilt control.
The latter method is investigated in this study, utilising
conventional sector BS antennas.
The optimal amount of tilt is a trade-off between coverage
and interference reduction, and is dependent on the real-time
traffic situation with a varying degree of user clustering or
hotspots. In a realistic network the traffic characteristics are
dynamically changing, and the optimum tilt therefore vary as
well. The technique of dynamically adapting the BS antenna
tilt to the current traffic conditions is referred to as automatic
tilt control. The capacity gain resulting is a statistical measure
that is dependant on the varying traffic conditions. This is
unlike for example adaptive antennas that provide a capacity
increase also during static traffic conditions.
Different methods for performing automatic tilt control are
possible, and several parameters can be used in the
optimisation. In this paper a method was employed where the
Anders G. Spilling
Mobile Terminals
Telenor Research and Development
Fornebu, Norway
Anders.Spilling@telenor.com
antenna tilt angles in clusters of three BSs were adjusted
relative to each other based on uplink load.
The optimisation may be performed fast, and adjust
instantaneously to traffic conditions, or slow, to adapt to the
traffic variations over time. It is also possible to pre-define tilt
settings for different times of the day (such as rush hour,
midday, evening, night) and different times of the week based
on historic data. Some method for remotely controlling and
optimising the BS antenna vertical tilt angle must be available
for these techniques to be efficient in a network.
In order to be able to evaluate the system performance of
automatic tilt control, a UMTS simulation platform was used.
It is partly based on a static simulator developed by Nokia
R&D [1]. In this study, simulations showing the influence on
total capacity by allowing tilt control for selected BSs under
varying traffic conditions are reported.
II. SIMULATION METHODOLOGY
The simulator allows the network situation to be analysed
at a given instant in time. To describe the statistical behaviour
of the cellular network, a number of trials are undertaken,
providing the average or typical performance of the network
under the given load and channel conditions. A traffic model
with parts of the traffic contained in hotspots was used, and the
capacity before and after tilt control was compared, varying the
position of the hotspots relative to the BSs as well as the
number of deployed mobile terminals in the coverage area.
A. Software architecture
The static Monte Carlo simulator used for evaluation of
adaptive antennas is described in some detail in [2] and [3].
The version used for the tilt control study is an extension of
this simulator. Fig. 1 shows the software architecture. System
initialisation is performed to assign BS positions, noise factors,
antenna diagrams and various other parameters. In a scenario
initialisation the situation that is to be simulated is created,
including the positioning of mobiles in the network. Each
scenario is simulated a number of times in a Monte Carlo-loop
to obtain statistically significant results. As shown in Fig. 1 the
tilt adjustment part begins with an initial estimate of the tilt
angles, based on theoretical load calculations. The uplink and
downlink are simulated independently, and together provide
the capacity in terms of number of users the network can simulation procedure Relative capacity improvement is found
sustain given the current propagation and interference by comparing the overall network capacity before and after tilt
condition, including the tilt angles. The tilt adjustment is adjustment.
performed iteratively in loop with the uplink and downlink
iterations.
Upon tilt adjustment convergence, or if the maximum
number of iterations have been reached, the program exits the
tilt adjustment part and returns the current number of users as
the capacity estimate. When all the Monte Carlo runs are
performed, the data are post processed to create statistical
results.

System initialisation

Monte Carlo Control

Figure 2. Cluster of BSs with tilt control

Scenario initialisation
Find MaxLoad and MinLoad

Initial Antenna Tilt

Calculation
No MaxLoad-MinLoad> Yes
Post processing
Margin?
Uplink
Iteration

MaxLoad tilt down

Downlink Antenna Tilt MinLoad tilt up
Iteration Adjustment

No

Convergence No Max # Figure 3. Tilt adjustment algorithm

Reached? of Iterations?

Yes Yes TABLE I. TILT ADJUSTMENT PARAMETERS

Figure 1. Software architecture
The algorithm for tilt control is based on relative load
between different BSs covering the same area, denoted a
cluster, as shown in Fig. 2, where a cluster of size 3 is
highlighted. The BS positions are indicated by the dots, each
BS covers three 120º sector cells. The adjustment algorithm is
illustrated in Fig. 3. It iteratively tilts the antenna in the cell
with the highest load down and the antenna in the cell with the
lowest load up by the predefined step size until the loads are
equal within a margin. Then convergence is considered to have
been reached. The load for cell number m is defined as
Im
Lm =
N + Im
where Im is the total interference experienced and N is thermal
noise. The tilt adjustment parameters are summarized in
Table I.
The simulations are performed with and without tilt control.
In the case without tilt control the tilt iteration is omitted in the
Parameter Value
Maximum BS load 0.75
Margin load difference 0.10
Max # iterations 500
Min. and max. tilt angle (deg) [-2 40]
Step size tilt adjustment (deg) 0.1
In addition, the scenarios are repeated with an increasing
number of mobiles until the grade-of-service (GOS, number of
mobiles receiving service divided by the total number of
available mobiles) is below a certain limit.
B. Simulation scenario and traffic modelling
The simulated scenario consists of 7 sites, each with 3
sectors, resulting in 21 cells, as shown in Figs. 2 and 7. The
(1) maximum distance between neighbouring sites was approx.
600 m. The users all employed symmetric traffic of 128 kbit/s
in both directions and a service activity factor of 1. The
allowable uplink load is limited to 0.75. Some of the main
system simulation parameters are given in Table II.
Initially all the BS antennas were tilted equally, optimised
for a situation with uniform traffic throughout the network. The
traffic model allocates a certain amount of the total traffic, in
this case a number of mobiles, into circular hotspots, as shown that a positive tilt would result in a more downward pointing
in Fig. 4. The remaining traffic is uniformly distributed into the antenna.
remaining part of the area.
The propagation channel is modelled by 3 separate
components: propagation path loss, shadow loss and directional
TABLE II. SYSTEM SIMULATION PARAMETERS multipath. The path loss model used is a single slope model
Parameter Value where the power loss gradient used is 3.5.
Carrier frequency 2 GHz
Chip rate 3.84 MChip/s
Pulse shaping filter rolloff factor 0.22
Thermal noise spectral density, N0 -174 dBm/Hz
Max. soft handover gain, uplink 2 dB
MS height above ground 1.5 m
MS antenna gain 0 dBi
MS max. transmit power 24 dBm
MS transmit power dynamic range 80 dB
MS noise figure 5 dB
MS req. Eb/N0 7 dB
MS receive pilot threshold level -115 dBm Offset
MS active set dynamic range 8 dB
BS max. transmit power 43 dBm
BS max. transmit power per channel 30 dBm
BS pilot power 30 dBm
BS other control channels power 30 dBm
BS transmit power dynamic range 30 dB
BS noise figure 5 dB
BS req. Eb/N0 4 dB Figure 5. User positions for one realisation of the traffic distribution
BS cable loss 2 dB
Angle (degrees)
0

315 45
Hot-spot 2
Y % of total
Hot-spot 1 traffic
X % of total
traffic

Total user area,

-50 -40 -30 -20 -10 0
(100-X-Y) % of total traffic) Gain (dBi)
270 90

Figure 4. Illustration of hotspot traffic model

In the simulations, 15 per cent of the total traffic was

allocated into three hotspots, each with radius of 100 m, as
shown in Fig. 5, where the red lines indicate the BS sector
antenna pointing directions. Three clusters utilised tilt control,
each containing 3 cells. One hotspot was contained in each
cluster. The simulations were performed with the hotspot
positioned in the centre of each cell cluster, and then repeated
with different offsets relative to this position, from 0 up to 250
m, in the direction as indicated by the arrows in Fig. 5. This
resulted in increasingly unbalanced traffic conditions. The
distance from the centre of the cluster to each of the BSs is 300
m, so that an offset from the cluster centre of 250 m would
result in the hotspot enclosing the cell site.
The antenna and propagation assumptions were similar to
the ones used in [2] and [3]. The base station antennas were
sector antennas. The antenna diagrams in azimuth and
elevation directions are illustrated in Fig. 6. Vertical tilt is
obtained by a clockwise rotation of the elevation diagram, so
Azimuth
225 Elevation 135
180
Figure 6. Azimuth and elevation pattern for sector antenna
The shadow loss is based on a Viterbi model, which
consists of an area dependant component that is due to the MS
position and a BS dependant component [5]. The resulting
lognormal distributed shadowing process has a standard
deviation of 8 dB. The directional model assumes the power
spectrum in azimuth to be Laplacian distributed [6]. In the
simulations 10 directional components were used, each of them
subject to independent fast fading.
 A pilot level plot for this scenario without tilt control is
shown in Fig. 7. The corresponding best server (based on pilot
level) plot for the area , based on one Monte Carlo iteration, is
displayed in Fig. 8. The somewhat irregular shape is caused by
the varying propagation conditions combined with the empiric
antenna diagrams that are used.
would increase with increasing offset from the cluster centre,
as expected.
Simulation results in terms of the GOS curves averaged
over all hotspot offset values between 0 and 250 m before and
after tilt control are shown in Fig. 10. The introduction of tilt
control increases the total network capacity in the order of 20
to 30 per cent. It was observed that the relative capacity
increase was largest for the highest GOS (99%), where average
gains of 30 per cent was observed.

Figure 7. Average maximum pilot level

Figure 9. Downtilt angle after convergence for the 9 cells in the three
clusters

100 10
Before tilt control
After tilt control
Difference
96 8

Grade of service difference (per cent)

Grade of service (per cent)

92 6

88 4

84 2
Figure 8. Best serving base station before tilt control

Note that the actual choice of BS for each MS is based on 80 0

minimising the MS transmit power, where interference is taken
20 40 60 80 100 120
into account in addition to path attenuation. Users

III. RESULTS Figure 10. Average GOS for all offset values before and after tilt control

The downtilt angle after convergence for a scenario with
150 m offset and 60 users is shown in Fig. 9. As illustrated,
cells 1-3 make up cluster 1, cells 4-6 cluster 2 and cells 7-9
cluster 3. In all the clusters one BS has a downtilt that is
significantly higher that the others. This was always the cell
towards which the hotspot was moved, and which therefore
initially experienced the highest load. The final downtilt value
The improvement in the GOS between the two cases
increase with increasing traffic load up to a point and reach a
maximum of about 8 per cent.
The capacity improvement in percent by using tilt control
for different levels of GOS and for different hotspot offsets
from cluster centre, i.e. for increasingly unbalanced traffic, is
shown in Table III. The capacity improvement increased with
increasing hotspot offset up to 150 m offset, which is 50% of
the distance from the cluster centre to each of the base stations.
In this case the improvement was 40 per cent on average. This
was as expected, as tilt control is most useful when the traffic is
unevenly distributed between the cells in the cluster. For larger
offset values, 200 m and 250 m, the improvement was very
limited. This is due to the total transmit power being the
limiting capacity factor for these instances and not uneven
load. In all the cases offsetting the hotspots away from the
cluster centres would increase the total capacity. This is due to
the effect the hotspot position has on network interference
level. When many users are located near the cell borders they
will all have high transmit power levels, resulting in an overall
high interference level in the network.
For all the results it should be noted that the improvements
are specific for the given traffic characteristics, and that other
scenarios will provide different values in terms of capacity.
TABLE III. IMPROVEMENT (%) BY USING TILT CONTROL
which is 50% of the distance from the cluster centre to each of
the base stations. In this case the improvement was 40 per cent
on average. Tilt control is most effective when the traffic is
unevenly distributed between the cells in the cluster. For the
highest values of hotspot offset, the improvement was very
limited. This is because in these cases total transmit power
limitations, and not uneven load, is limiting the capacity.
It was concluded that automatic tilt control is a viable
alternative for interference reduction purposes and thereby
provisioning of better overall network performance during
dynamically changing traffic situations. The optimisation may
be fast, and adjust instantaneously to traffic conditions, or
slow, to adapt to the traffic variations over time. It is also
possible to pre-define tilt settings for different times of the day
and different times of the week based on experience. However,
it should be noted that the gain is very dependant on the traffic
characteristics and therefore specific for these traffic
conditions.

Hotspot 99% 95% 90% 85% 80%

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