On the high capacity lightradio™ metro cell design for stadiums

Offering good quality of experience (QoE) in stadiums poses unprecedented challenges to wireless operators, due to extreme traffic conditions. During popular sporting events, there could be tens of thousands of active users packed into a relatively small area, sharing pictures and video clips through smartphone applications. This creates high traffic densities and drives requirements for high capacity, yet economically feasible solutions for stadiums. Ensuring high capacity in open environments with high interference such as these is a daunting task. In this paper we explain why Alcatel-Lucent's lightRadio™ metro cells offer a good solution for stadium deployments due to their particular ability to provide high “local” capacity. We demonstrate key design concepts employed to achieve a target capacity with lightRadio metro cells including the number of metro cells and their optimal locations, power levels, antenna patterns and orientation, and frequency reuse patterns. We further quantify the capacity benefits of using metro cells through a comprehensive performance analysis framework using Long Term Evolution (LTE) as an example.