The Tradeoff Between Coverage and Capacity in Dynamic Optimization of 3G Cellular Networks

For 3G cellular networks, capacity is an important objective, along with coverage, when characterizing the performance of high-data-rate services. In live networks, the effective network capacity heavily depends on the degree that the traffic load is balanced over all cells, so changing traffic patterns demand dynamic network reconfiguration to maintain good performance. Using a four-cell sample network, and antenna tilt, cell power level and pilot fraction as adjustment variables, we study the competitive character of network coverage and capacity in such a network optimization process, and how it compares to the CDMA-intrinsic coverage-capacity tradeoff driven by interference. We find that each set of variables provides its distinct coverage-capacity tradeoff behavior with widely varying and application-dependent performance gains. The study shows that the impact of dynamic load balancing highly depends on the choice of the tuning variable as well as the particular tradeoff range of operation.