Indoor Radio Planning: A Practical Guide for GSM, DCS, UMTS, HSPA and LTE, Second Edition

12.2 Micro Cell Capacity

Even though micro cells are a strong tool for reaching indoor users in dense areas, typically capacity hot spots, there remains one major challenge: capacity design and the lack of resource sharing. Ideally, one should be sure to implement the individual micro cells precisely in the traffic hot spot in order to maximize capacity and performance, as discussed in the first part of this chapter. That however, can be a challenge; you might not get permission to deploy the micro cell in the exact desired location but perhaps 100 meters from an ideal location and that can easily represent an offset of half the size of a cell. This results in having the HO zone directly on top of the hot spot, which is not ideal – certainly not for UMTS and LTE. In Figure 12.5 we can see this principle in a micro cell network structure; a centralized controller will connect to a number of micro cells – in this case four, cells 1 to 4, deployed in the targeted hot spot area. This structure is static in terms of capacity allocation once deployed; the capacity offering will be assigned to the individual locations of the individual cells, each serving a fixed area – greatly dependent on the actual installation challenge of each of the cells and servicing antennas.

Figure 12.5 Typical micro cell structure, one central controller connected to a number of micro cells in a fixed sector allocation

Static Capacity Allocation

Static micro cell capacity can also be depicted as in Figure ...