Designing and Planning LTE Radio Network in some part of Khatai district of Baku using Atoll Amjad Jumani Department of Radio Frequency Netkom Technologies Ltd Karachi, Pakistan amjadjumani1991@gmail.com Dr. Muhammad Imran Aslam Department of Telecommunication Engineering NED University of Engineering & Technology Karachi, Pakistan iaslam@neduet.edu.pk Aamir Zeb Shaikh Department of Telecommunication Engineering NED University of Engineering & Technology Karachi, Pakistan aamirzeb@neduet.edu.pk Abstract— To cater large number of mobile users along with new applications and gadgets, higher speed and capacity is required in the networks. To overcome this hunger 3GPP has introduced a new high speed and lower latency radio access technology called as Long Term Evolution. This is the fourth generation technology as specified by 3GPP standards which can support from 1.4MHz to 20MHz channel bandwidth along with peak of 100Mbps and 50Mbps in Uplink. In this study we have selected some part of Khatai district of Baku City of Azerbaijan to plan and design a LTE network by providing simulations of coverage by signal level and coverage by signal- to-noise-ratio. Keywords— Long Term Evolution, Radio Network Planning, Coverage Prediction, evolved-NodB (eNB) I. INTRODUCTION Due to rapid increase in technology trends day by day this world has become a global village. After every ten years, new technology is emerging to ease the needs and demands of people. This faster growing trend has urged the researchers to develop 4G technology which is a converged network compatible with future generation networks [1]. LTE is determined to anchor maximum throughputs of up to 100Mbps in Downlink and up to 50 Mbps in Uplink depending upon various channel conditions. The channel bandwidths for LTE range from 1.4MHz to 20MHz. The main thing about this technology is that the frequency usage is used in an optimized manner along with the spectral efficiency [2]. The wireless technologies such as 2G/3G/4G are meant to focus on the Quality of Service (QoS) and user satisfaction. These QoS are set to achieve the best target coverage, signal quality and maximum throughput but there are always certain challenges which arise such as environment, fading, reflections, refractions, diffractions, shadowing, noise etc. due to this many of the QoS KPIs are compromised [3]. The prediction of Coverage is considered an important and initial part for telecom operators to deploy any network. It gives an idea and basic understanding by showing a picture that how enough coverage is required to cater the number of subscribers [4]. Baku is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. It lies 28 m below sea level and is also named as “The city of Winds”. It has very rich historical background, politics, tourism and diplomacy of Azerbaijan [6]. In this study we have designed LTE network with technical configurations such as using Frequency Band 9 (Downlink frequency: 1844.9MHz ~ 1879.9MHz), Center Frequency is 1862.4 MHz and Channel Bandwidth is 20MHz. The paper is organized as follows. Section II provides an overview of the LTE architecture. LTE system planning and design is summarized in section III. Section IV presents our simulation results. Section V concludes the paper. II. LTE AND ITS ARCHITECTURE In the mid-2000s, the 3G (UMTS) networks weighed down by LTE to emerge as 4G networks which is fully IP based and focused on delivering multimedia content with improvement of QoS. Many important techniques such as OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) and AMC (Adaptive Modulation and Coding) are allowing LTE to offer low latency and high throughput rates [2]. LTE has numerous advantages such as supporting both duplex modes such as FDD and TDD. It is also backward compatible with previous technologies such as 2G and 3G networks. It has very simple architecture making it very cost optimal solution for operators [4]. LTE network architecture comprises of two main portions Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Networks (E-UTRAN). E-UTRAN contains Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio access Network Base Stations (eNodeB) and the User Equipment (UE), where the UE communicates with eNB and eNBs can communicate with each other using X2 interface. EPC contains a Mobile Management Entity (MME) and a System Architecture Evolution Gateway (SGW) together with a Packet Data Network Gateway (PDN GW) [1]. The simplified overall structure of LTE is shown in Figure 1.