Performance Evaluation of a Deployed 4G LTE Network

Abstract

In Ghana and many countries within Sub-Sahara Africa, Long Term Evolution (LTE) is being considered for use within the sectors of Governance, Energy distribution and transmission, Transport, Education and Health. Subscribers and Governments within the region have high expectations for these new networks and want to leverage the promised enhanced coverage and high data rates for development. Recent performance evaluations of deployed WiMAX networks in Ghana showed promising performance of a wireless broadband technology in supporting the capacity demands needed in the peculiar Sub-Saharan African terrain. The deployed WiMAX networks, however could not achieve the optimal quality of service required for providing a seamless wireless connectivity demands needed for emerging mobile applications. This paper evaluates the performance of some selected key network parameters of a newly deployed LTE network in the 2600 MHz band operating in the peculiar Sub-Saharan African terrain under varied MIMO Antenna Configurations. We adopted simulation and field measurement to aid us in our evaluation. Genex Unet has been used to simulate network coverage and throughput performance of 2X2, 4X4 and 8X8 MIMO configurations of the deployed networks. The average simulated throughput per sector of 4X4 MIMO configuration was seen to be better than the 2X2 configuration. However, the percentage coverage for users under the 2x2 MIMO simulation scenario was better than that of the adaptive 4x4 MIMO configuration with 2x2 MIMO achieving 60.41% of coverage area having throughput values between 1 - 40Mbps as against 55.87% achieved by the 4x4 MIMO configuration in the peculiar deployment terrain.