2

UMTS Network Planning, Optimization, and Inter-Operation with GSM

used GSM for the 2G network. UMTS is managed by the 3GPP organization, which also
became responsible for the GSM continued standardization from July 2000. CDMA2000 is
another significant 3G standard that is an outgrowth of the earlier 2G CDMA standard IS-95.
CDMA2000s primary proponents are mainly in the Americas, Japan, and Korea, though
UMTS is being tested and deployed at this time in the Americas by T-Mobile and Cingular.
CDMA2000 is managed by 3GPP2, which is separate and independent from UMTSs 3GPP.
The various types of transmission technology used in CDMA2000 include 1xRTT,
CDMA2000-1xEV-DO, and 1xEV-DV. China has also come up with a Standard of its
own, referred to as TD-SCDMA, which has been developed by the companies Datang and
Siemens, for which field trails have been taking place in Beijing and Shanghai.
The first commercial UMTS network was deployed by Japans NTT DoCoMo in 2001.
Since then UMTS networks have been deployed in more than 20 countries including
Germany, France, UK, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain, and Bahrain.
The 3G networks based on WCDMA continue to be deployed in more and more countries.
This situation is demanding that more and more radio planning professionals become
more familiar with the WCDMA technology to design and launch high quality 3G
networks. This book has been written with a heavy emphasis on radio planning and
optimization principles for RF engineering professionals. The book also contains four
extensive chapters (Chapters 13 to 16), which discuss the end-to-end QoS (Quality of
Service) inter-working, and the design, dimensioning, and optimization of the access
network, the core network, and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) protocol for
wireless networks. Therefore this book is expected to benefit protocol and core network
engineering professionals as well, and provide a good reference for the end-to-end
network planning and optimization. 3G network planning involves a number of new
challenges over the 2G networks, which relate to the underlying WCDMA radio access,
the multi-service requirements, and opportunities to make use of new technologies in the
core network such as the split connection and call control architectures (soft switching)
for the design of efficient scaleable and flexible network architectures. These challenges
are briefly outlined in this introductory chapter, and then discussed in greater detail and
depth in the remaining chapters. This book is also expected to be highly valuable for
graduate level students and new researchers in the field with an interest in the WCDMA
technologies for network planning and optimization.
The development of the UMTS specifications based on W-CDMA in 3GPP has taken
several phases. The first release of the UMTS specifications is known as 3GPP R99, which
was functionally frozen in December 1999. The 3GPP R99 implementation offers the same
services with those of GSM Phase 2 (GPRS/EDGE). That is, all the same supplementary
services are available; teleservices and bearer services have different implementation but this
is not visible to the subscriber. The 3G network in this phase may offer some other services
not available in GSM, for example, a video call. The second phase known as 3GPP Release
4 introduces all-IP in the core network allowing separation of call control and signaling from
the actual connection or media used on the core network (CN) side to transport circuit
switched (CS) services such as voice. In the CN CS domain actual user data flow passes
through Media Gateways (MGW), which are elements that maintain the connection and
perform switching functions when required. The whole process is controlled by a separate
element evolved from MSC/VLR called MSC server. One MSC server can handle numerous
MGWs thus making the CN CS domain scalable. This approach is also referred to as soft