Performance Evaluation of 6-Sector Site and Small Cell for Addis Ababa UMTS Deployment Scenario

The demand for high data rate has been increasing due to various innovative data services that improve human life. To accommodate the increasing demand with satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS), operators must continuously improve their network capacity. To that end, besides deploying a Fourth-Generation (4G) network, already operational Third-Generation (3G) network capacity can be improved by applying various capacity improving techniques including six sectorization, adding small cells, macro site densification, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) and using multiple carrier. In this thesis, capacity challenges of Addis Ababa Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) network are analyzed using real data from network management system. Further, performance evaluation and comparison of six-sector sites, small cell deployment and their hybrid deployments are presented in the context of addressing the capacity challenges. The evaluation is performed using carrier to interference plus noise ratio (CINR) and throughput metrics and WinProp based propagation computation and network simulation by applying dominant path pathloss model over building map of selected deployment area of Addis Ababa. Results show that full deployment of six-sector has performance improvement compared to full 3-sector with 2.9 dB CINR and 284.23% DL throughput gains. In addition, 6-sector with 3-sector (hybrid) has 2.2 dB and 231.05% gain in CINR and DL throughput compared to full 3-sector deployment respectively. Furthermore, femto with 5% penetration has 0.3 dB CINR gain over full 3-sector. Based on the results, deployment of 6 sector site (both full and hybrid) can enhance capacity of UMTS network significantly and can elevate the capacity challenges faced. Furthermore, femto also has improved the capacity and with an increase in penetration ratio, the gain can be further increased.