Performance evaluation of 3G CDMA networks with antenna arrays

The 2G CDMA IS-95A cellular network has been deployed for almost eight yean. Although the system design rules and operating procedures for voice services are well established and understood, these rules and procedures need to be re-examined in light of several technology innovations. These innovations include the launch of cdma2000 1x high-rate data services and the new research results in interference cancellation, antenna array and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies. We have built a 3G cdma2000 1x cellular simulator, which simulates the physical layer using MATLAB and networking layers using OPNET Modeler, to investigate various design issues of cdma2000 1x networks. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of deploying antenna array techniques in CDMA networks using cdma2000 1x cellular simulator. We evaluate the capacity improvement for CDMA networks using antenna array technique under different deployment scenarios. We propose to utilize antenna array as one of the elements in QOS provisioning for data services. We also propose to couple antenna array with dynamic soft hand off thresholds adjustment to further improve the system capacity.