Impact of Base Station Locations and Antenna Orientations on UMTS Radio Network Capacity and Coverage Evolution

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of the base station site locations and antenna orientations on UMTS radio network performance under different traffic distributions, and to find an optimum deployment strategy from 3-sectored to 6-sectored site solutions. A radio network planning tool has been used to verify the radio network system performance of different network scenarios. The results show that UMTS network is fairly robust for small base station site location and antenna orientation deviations. Furthermore, the results indicate that in UMTS radio network planning, the concentration should be paid rather on the base station site and antenna configurations than on base station location. According to the simulations, the most efficient 6sectored capacity and coverage network configuration can be achieved by utilizing horizontally 33° half power narrow beam antennas.