Estimation of spectrum requirements of IMT-advanced systems: Licenciate thesis

This thesis reviews the preparatory work at International Telecommunication Union (ITU) towards the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2007 (WRC-07) in terms of frequency-related matters for the future development of International Mobile Telecommunications 2000 (IMT-2000, i.e., 3G) and IMT-Advanced, i.e., 4G systems. The emphasis in the thesis is on the developed ITU spectrum requirement calculation methodology which is used to estimate the total spectrum demand for the future development of IMT-2000 and IMT-Advanced at WRC-07 for 2010 to 2020. The connections of the methodology to other sources, such as market studies and radio issues are also discussed. This thesis reviews the spectrum requirement calculation methodology for the future development of IMT-2000 and IMT-Advanced in detail and highlights the most important steps in the methodology flow. The methodology considers the whole market of wireless services in 2010, 2015, and 2020 and considers the existing, emerging and future wireless systems on the radio access technique (RAT) group level, rather than going into detail about individual systems. The methodology employs market studies with predicted traffic volumes of future services and calculates the capacity requirements, taking into account the gain of multiplexing different service categories with differing quality of service (QoS) constraints. Capacity requirements are transformed into spectrum requirements using spectral efficiency values. Spectrum requirements are further adjusted with practical network deployments to estimate the final spectrum requirements of the future development of IMT-2000 and IMT-Advanced in 2010, 2015, and 2020. Special emphasis in the thesis is given to implementation of the developed software for the calculation methodology, which will be used by ITU at WRC-07. The structure and use of the software tool are explained in detail, including the inputs and outputs of the tool, as well as the intermediate calculations. In addition, the different input parameters to the methodology, including market parameters, radio parameters and other parameters, are described, including their use in the methodology and their effect on the calculations. Examples of spectrum requirements using the methodology and the tool to quantify the effect of the different input parameters are also provided. Using the ITU agreed parameter set as the starting point, the values of one parameter at a time are changed to examine the effects on the spectrum requirements. The spectrum calculation methodology is sensitive to the different input parameters and therefore the input parameter values must be selected carefully. Some of the parameters, such as market parameters, have a straight forward relation to the traffic volumes, and thus the spectrum requirements, while the effect of other parameters is more difficult to predict due to their special use in the methodology.