Transport solutions for 3G cellular radio access network

Although the planning, design, acquisition, and deployment of radio base station sites are seen as the major challenges in the roll out of 3G networks, the associated provision and optimisation of transport capacity to link these sites to the controller and switching sites presents its own problems to network operators. This paper examines the requirements and standards for transport within the 3GPP Release 99 Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) based UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN), and presents a number of solution architectures that address these requirements.