Category: 2015

This document is the final deliverable of the NGMN Small Cell project. It summarizes all the activities that have run in parallel in the 3 work streams of the project and it contains recommendations for cost effective Small Cell deployment and development.

In particular, this deliverable contains a summary of the most promising use cases and scenarios for Small Cell deployment that have been identified among the operators members of NGMN. Some technical solutions able to proper address the identified scenario, are also analysed. Moreover, a list of the most critical barriers for Small Cell deployment have been identified and some of those barriers have been addressed (i.e. traffic geolocalization in order to proper place Small Cells, macro-Small Cell mobility and load coordination, …).

This deliverable also contains the requirements for multi-vendor deployment of HetNet networks that are broadly addressed in dedicated deliverables [3, 4].

At last, also backhaul requirements for HetNet networks beyond release 8 are included, summarizing and complementing further requirements contained in other NGMN deliverables.

This paper considers transport capacity provisioning in LTE-Advanced (release 10) heterogeneous networks. It builds on the detailed analyses in LTE release 8 homogenous macrocells networks presented in NGMN’s “Guidelines for LTE Backhaul Traffic Estimation”, and also in “Small Cell Backhaul Requirements”. These works showed that backhaul traffic per cell site can be characterised by a ‘busy time’ loaded figure and a ‘quiet time’ peak. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the highest data rates seen on a last mile backhaul link occur during the light loading conditions needed to achieve the ‘headline’ peak user data rates. When the whole network is busy, inter-cell interference and users with a range of signal qualities result in lower cell average throughput figures. For the LTE downlink, peak rates are around 4-6x the busy time mean. When provisioning transport for the ‘last mile’ to the base station, the peak can dominate. When provisioning for aggregates of several cells towards the core network, the busy time mean dominates.

This document presents the motives and business benefits of MRJRO, primarily centered around the dominance of multi-RAT deployment scenarios and the potential performance gains due to enhanced resource utilization with MRJRO. Based on MRJRO requirements, the hardware, reliability, adaptation and implementation requirements to introduce both semi-dynamic and fully dynamic MRJRO are specified. The constraints that stand in the way of MRJRO, mainly the introduction of Inter-RAT intercell Interference (IRI) and the management of control signaling in fully dynamic MRJRO, are also studied.

In existing commercial and trial LTE networks, testing results show that the inter-cell interference is very severe. CoMP is an important feature to cope with the inter-cell interference from operators’ point of view. In this white paper, CoMP field trial testing results are shared and different enhanced CoMP schemes are compared. Moreover, a recommendation and a guideline from operators’ point of view are required to drive 3GPP to further enhance CoMP air-interface and network standardization.

This document specifies the requirements on fronthaul solutions which are essential to enable C-RAN deployment on a large scale. In particular, this document addresses the requirements on the following aspects.

• Basic requirements
• Performance
• Topology
• Reliability & QoS
• O&M
• Network sharing
• Miscellaneous