WCDMA radio network planning for location services and system capacity

The majority of radio network planning processes being developed for WCDMA focus upon providing adequate coverage and capacity performance. These processes generally include the requirement to tune the CPICH physical channel such that sufficient power is assigned to provide coverage without assigning excessive power that would result in less power being available to user traffic. This paper studies the performance of OTDOA based location services when the radio network has been planned without explicitly accounting for the requirement to receive at least three CPICH signals at each location. The paper continues by studying the impact upon both system capacity and OTDOA performance when the power assigned to the CPICH channel is increased.