Simulative Methods of Estimating and Modifying Deployed 4G LTE Network Capacity in Terms of Throughput Performance

Abstract

Telecommunication network and system is fast replacing all other sectors of economy as the bedrock upon which every business thrives today. Oil and gas industries, national security, financial institutes, agricultural sector, learning institutes etc., cannot effectively function without efficiently enabling telecommunication infrastructure for purposes of remote data acquisition, exchange of information, data storage and integrity, precision agriculture, facility monitoring and management, instrumentation, exploration, crude oil refining, distribution chain, automated metering and billing, digital reports etc. Though Nigeria launched 4th generation Long Term Evolution (4G LTE) network in 2013 to be able to support ever demanding and reliable network architecture capable of enabling high speed data rate greater than 20 Mbps (Mega Bits Per Second), however,Nigeria has a poor communication networks which has contributed to decline of economic growth in recent years. Identifying and solving telecommunication problem in Nigeria is major task of this paper which presented simulative methods of estimating and modifying deployed 4G network considering factors that improves the network capacity and performance. End to end system level simulation was carried out using MATLAB tool box facilitated by empirical data of SPECTRANET LTD, Abuja which is used as a case study in this paper. Bit Error Rate (BER) testing, Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) performance test and User Equipment (UE) propagation model proved to be powerful techniques of investigating transmission of digital bits over 4G LTE network and results obtained demonstrated that lower modulation order scheme, Quadrature Phase shift Key (QPSK) presented stronger BER performance (10-4 ) with -3dB energy per bit to noise power spectral density ratio while 16QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and 64QAM had same BER performance(10-4) with energy per bit to noise power spectral density ratio (Eb/No) of 2dB and 4dB respectively, however, LTE Physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) throughput conformance test carried out, proved that signals received in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) system demonstrated better SNR performance than received signals in Time Division Duplex (TDD) system by 1.2%.