RF-Repeater Performance Assessment and Planning Guidelines for WCDMA Networks

Abstract

Although repeaters have been used and studied in some extent in cellular mobile networks in the past, a clear need for comprehensive system level analysis of repeaters exists. This thesis provides a thorough assessment regarding RF-repeater system level WCDMA performance. To emphasize, the performance assessment is made from radio network planning aspect. In addition to the theoretical discussion in the field of repeaters, the thesis presents several practical guidelines that can be used in the network planning. The information given to readers in this thesis is mostly applicable for network operators, as they need to plan radio networks that provide high system capacity with limited amount of radio equipment and efficient utilization of radio resources. After the introduction part, in Chapter 2, theory of assessing repeaters and their performance in WCDMA system is presented. The assessment covers the essential repeater-related phenomena such as noise and repeater configuration related matters, which have significant impact on the system level WCDMA performance. The methods of capturing the data and analyzing the performance in system level are included in the thesis. The results from the actual research papers are summarized and discussed in the following chapter, Chapter 3, which concentrates on improving radio network performance using repeaters. The main observations from system level simulations, calculations, and measurements are discussed keeping in mind the original title of the thesis- i.e. providing the planning guidelines for repeaters in WCDMA networks. At first, capacity improvement due to repeaters serving traffic hot spots is studied by simulations and measurements. The work under the hot spot topic is extended into a journal article by performing measurements to support the findings from the simulations. In the later publications, studies related to outdoor-to-indoor repeaters and different macrocellular topologies are presented. It has been shown by measurements, how a macrocellular repeater can be effectively used to improve the WCDMA performance in a building. The repeater performance is also set against dedicated indoor base station. The studies with different macrocellular network topologies provided new information concerning the efficiency of repeater. Finally, the effects of different repeater configurations are presented by showing numerical calculation results for the varying donor antenna beam and mother base station antenna tilt. Furthermore, measurement results of different repeater antenna line configurations are shown to emphasize the importance of repeater antenna line planning.