Air Interface Capacity Dimensioning for 4G and Beyond Mobile Networks

In early generations of mobile communication systems, Air Interface capacity dimensioning was being done by estimating the total number of channels needed by a certain number of users, while maintaining some specific Grade Of Service (GOS), which is sometimes referred to as the blocking probability. Over the past few years, mobile communication systems have been experiencing significant changes in several aspects including, traffic behavior, services supported, and QoS characteristics of these services. Consequently, the classical approaches originally used for capacity dimensioning were found to be inapplicable anymore, and the need for a new capacity dimensioning method has arisen. The scope of this paper is to build new traffic models that are capable of describing the traffic in an efficient way, and to develop a new Capacity dimensioning algorithm designed specifically for the case of LTE/LTE-A while maintaining an upward compatibility with the upcoming and emerging technologies. In order to use the offered cell Throughputs as a basic metric for networks performance assessment, it was chosen to develop our dimensioning algorithm to be Throughput-based; with the output of the Cell Throughput required to achieve predefined QoS levels