On the Analysis and Tool Development of the Long Term Evolution Cell Planning

As the countdown to the 5G revolution has begun, the deployment of desirable non-standalone 5G new radio networks will necessarily demand to be built based on well-planned and optimized existing LTE networks. Mobile Network planning reduces the network flaws, maintenance operations and wasted resources, leading to minimising the pre-deployment and post-deployment cost. This paper includes coverage and capacity planning for long-term evolution networks, implemented in a tool using C# programming. In coverage planning part we conducted the detailed link budget analysis to obtain the maximum allowable path loss on the radio link. After that, we studied propagation models and used it in calculating cell size. In the end, we performed mathematical calculations to find the number of needed cells for the coverage. The capacity planning part deals with studying the requirements in the network, to meet the needed data speeds for different services such as VoIP, video calls and conferences, real-time gaming, streaming and web browsing. We used the service models, and traffic models approach to estimate the single-user average throughput during the network busy hour. Then we calculated the cell average throughput, determined the physical layer specifications, and finally, we ended up with obtaining the number of cells for capacity considerations.