Verification of 3G radio network dimensioning rules with static network simulations

The third generation cellular systems will offer services well beyond the capabilities of today's networks. For an operator to optimise their business cases accurate methods are required for the capacity and coverage estimation. The scope of this paper is to concentrate on the first phase of the radio network planning process: radio network dimensioning. Dimensioning is providing the first rough estimate of the radio network's capabilities in terms of capacity, coverage and quality. In this work the radio network dimensioning rules and methods are introduced. Furthermore, the proposed methods are verified with radio network simulations. It has been demonstrated that the proposed methods work reasonable well even with relatively high bit rates. In addition to that it is shown that in case of WCDMA macrocell dimensioning it is not adequate to base the results on uplink only.