Dimensioning of Hierarchical B3G Networks with Multiple Classes of Traffic

Dimensioning of mobile networks (e.g. 2G, 3G, WLAN etc.) is more or less restricted to the service area projection and wireless capacity formulation (calculation of number of base stations/access points (BSs/APs) required) in supporting the anticipated traffic load. As the Beyond Third Generation (B3G) network promises to provide inter-connectivity among all existing technologies with minimal software and hardware upgrade, any significant change to coverage area and capacity of existing networks will violate this key promise. To adhere to the B3G definition, in this paper we have proposed a dimensioning framework that is confined to the wired part of the network and will support wide area coverage (typically for high speed subscribers) in the presence of multiple classes of traffic. The framework derives an initial estimate bound of wired network elements (i.e. number of BSs per AR, number of ARs per MAP and number of MAPs per GW) in a multi-tier hierarchical system based on user capacity limits (soft-capacity), future traffic projection and mean traffic load (or average data rate) for each class of traffic. Simulation results demonstrate the wired network bound under different traffic distributions and for bounded average cell capacities (soft-capacity)