Investigation of 3G radio network topologies considering performance and exposure aspects

Five different radio network topologies, in the following referred to as "scenario", have been analyzed with regard to their capability to cover a medium size city with 3G mobile services. T-Mobile launched this study to assess different radio network topologies in terms of exposure. Thus, the main focus is to examine if, for exposure reasons, a medium size city can be covered with outer-city located sites. The radio network topologies discussed in this paper can generally be divided into two categories: In category one, the sites are located in the city, and in the other, the sites are located outside of the built-up area. In both cases the number of sites per scenario varies, and additionally the antenna height and site distance to the built-up area vary for the second category. The investigations are performed with a ray optical propagation model based on 3-D building data and a dynamic 3G network simulator. A mix of four services and a realistic spatial traffic distribution based on land usage is assumed. The performance of the scenarios, assessed by the evaluation of coverage and capacity, is examined together with the exposure. It is shown that network topologies with sites located only outside the city are not an adequate solution due to capacity constraints and coverage problems with high data services. A promising network topology is a reduced set of inner-city sites with higher order sectorization.