LTE Cellular Network Planning for Urban Area

2. Radio Link Budget

Since operators are rightfully focused on the service quality of a system, radio network coverage becomes an important part of the service quality of a system. The main purpose of radio network planning is to keep balance coverage, capacity, system quality, and total cost so none of these can be considered in isolation.

The purpose of Radio Link Budge (RLB) can be short out as follows (Harri Holma, 2011; Md. Masud et al., 2012):

• 1.

  Calculate such a factor that can solely describe building penetration loss, feeder loss, transmitting antenna gain, and the interferences;

• 2.

  Calculate the margin of the radio link to find out all related gains and losses that can affect the whole cell coverage;

• 3.

  Based on eNodeB transmit power allocation and the maximum transmit power of the terminal, estimate the maximum link loss of a radio link;

• 4.

  Whenever estimate the maximum link loss of a radio link allowed under certain propagation model, coverage radius of a base station can be obtained. Then this radius can be used for subsequent design.

During radio network planning designer’s need to consider various factor that will affect the coverage radius of a cell and the total number of base station required to cover any particular area. The key affecting parameters are groups as the following:

• 1.

  Propagation related parameters, such as the penetration loss, feeder loss, body loss, and background noise;

• 2.

  Equipment related parameters, transmit power, receiver sensitivity, and antenna gain;

• 3.

  LTE specific parameters, such as Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) gain, power boosting gain, edge coverage rate, repeat coding gain, interference margin, and fast fading margin;

• 4.

  System Reliability parameters, such as slow fading margin;

• 5.

  Specific features that will affect the final path gain.