Application of Intra-RAN Flexible Spectrum Use to Networks with Multi-Rate Services

Flexible spectrum use (FSU) within a radio access network (RAN) offers a flexible way to adapt the network capacity to the spatial and diurnal variations on the user distributions over the cell and network areas. In this paper, FSU is applied to the downlink of a radio access network (RAN) that utilises both wideband (WB) and narrowband (NB) carriers. Intra-RAN FSU is used to provide flexibility in the spectrum use between the WB and NB carriers. The considered network is assumed to offer multiple real-time and non-real-time services. The focus of the paper is to determine performance of the considered spectrum use scenarios against the average distance of active users to their nearest basestation. The obtained results indicate that although the WB carrier is able to provide high peak data rates, its performance is highly dependent on the average distance of active users and substantial improvement on downlink performance of the network can be obtained by fragmenting spectrum according to the average distance of active users