A New Approach to Capacity Growth Planning for CDMA Networks

Today's wireless network operators are facing dual challenges in their network infrastructure management. 2G to 3G evolution has increased network complexities, while at the same time enabling an explosion in services demand. To remain competitive, quality of service (QoS) must be effectively managed and a level of capital efficiency maintained which ensures long-term profitability. Service providers need to forecast growth on their network to ensure just-in-time capacity provisioning. When introducing new services or features to their customers, operators also want to understand how the traffic will impact their network and what they can do to ensure the network remains optimized with respect to QoS. A new approach to capacity planning for growing CDMA networks is described, based on the recognition that resource utilization depends not only on the capacity of individual network elements, but also on the configuration of those elements, as well as their interactions at the functional level. This approach relies on automation to produce "bottom-up" end-to-end capacity models to allow multi-iterative equipment forecasting. Our paper discusses the approach in more detail, as well as case studies where it has helped service providers achieve faster and more accurate capacity planning cycles while balancing QoS and capital investment constraints