Node B Power Sharing Capacity Benefits

This paper presents results demonstrating the capacity benefits of Node B Power Sharing, hereafter referred to a NBPS, in a UMTS network for sites that are sectored. It is clear that NBPS at a sectored site has the potential to offer substantial gains when the traffic distribution is non-uniform across those sectors, i.e. hot-spot situations; however, this paper will demonstrate that even when the traffic is circuit switched only and the network uniformly loaded, capacity gains in the order of six percent can be achieved. Previous work has examined the capacity benefits using a static system level simulator [1]; however, full system level simulation was used to generate the results presented in this paper. This has the significant advantage of enabling the full microscopic dynamics of the system to be modelled; in particular, the short timescale fluctuations in the power demands placed on the Node B. Such variations arise from the time varying nature of the channel, as well as from the traffic arrivals and departures. It is through averaging of these short term power demands across the Node-B´s sectors that the capacity gains are achieved