Urban Communication, 3G

The network planning of an urban scenario is investigated. The geometry is described by extruded polygons that represent urban buildings.

Figure 1. Geometry for urban communication with 3G network planning project.


Tip: On the Edit toolbar, click the 3D View icon.

Sites and Antennas

There are two omnidirectional (isotropic) antennas placed at different locations (see the blue dots in Figure 1). The antennas are installed at the same height and operate on the same carrier frequency around 2 GHz.

Air Interface

The air interface is defined by a UMTS wireless standard (.wst) file. CDMA/WCDMA/HSPA (code division multiple access) is selected for multiple access. The required Channel Bandwidth and Carrier Separation are added under the Air Interface tab.
Tip: Click Project > Edit Project Parameter and click the Air Interface tab to view the carriers and transmission modes.

Computational Method

The computational method used in this model is the dominant path model (DPM). This method DPM focuses on the most relevant path, which leads to shorter computation times compared to ray tracing.
Tip: Click Project > Edit Project Parameter and click the Computation tab to change the model.

Results

Results are computed for each antenna. Propagation results show the power received by a hypothetical isotropic receiver from each transmitting antenna at every location.

The type of network simulation is a static simulation (homogeneous traffic per cell). Network results in this project include the following for every location:
  • best server
  • maximum data rate
  • maximum throughput
  • site area
It also calculates the following parameters:
  • minimum required transmitter power
  • maximum achievable received signal strength
  • maximum achievable Eb/N0, maximum achievable Ec/(N0+I0)
  • maximum number of parallel streams
The above parameters are computed at each location for all modulation and coding schemes used in this model, for both downlink and uplink.
White pixels indicate that no communication is possible with the given modulation and coding scheme. Many pixels remain white in this example, especially with the faster schemes. Figure 2 shows an example of a network-planning result.
Figure 2. Uplink results for network planning.