Applicability of New Radio Technologies for Advanced UMTS Networks

One main objective of this article is to discuss UMTS network enhancement by the techniques mentioned above. We present relative gain figures in terms of system capacity gain, coverage enhancements or emission reduction under UMTS constraints. This covers also the impact of new transceivers on UMTS specific radio resource management algorithms. Since smart antennas highly suffer from extreme installation effort, special focus is given on migration aspects for that technique. Here, migration aspects to be considered are complexity, scalability, and investment protection. These aspects have to be balanced against the gains achieved in uplink and downlink.