USRAN Capacity Study and Dimensioning

In order to achieve global roaming of UMTS users, the satellite segment is integrated in the UMTS terrestrial radio access network and it replaces a terrestrial Node B. As the satellite capacity to support a big number of users at the same time is high, terrestrial RNC will just support one satellite/Node B instead of several terrestrial Node B, meaning a gain in coverage. Our proposal is to study the capacity of USRAN (UMTS satellite radio access network) for mixed traffics sent over satellite channel in order to achieve dimensioning that can be used for call admission control. The interest of such a study is to give the possibility of USRAN dimensioning, i.e., to determine the capacity needed for a number of flows given by the operator. In this paper we describe the network architecture for satellite integration with UMTS terrestrial radio access network. Performance analysis and testing were done for voice traffics represented by an ON/OFF source model as well as for data transfer application