SOURCE:

Faculty: Engineering
Department: Electronic And Computer Engineering

CONTRIBUTORS:

Ogbuokebe, K.S
Idigo, V.E

ABSTRACT:

The increasing demand for mobile broadband services with high data rate, speed and quality of service has been the inspiration behind Fourth Generation Long Term Evolution (4G LTE) network deployment in Nigeria. This research is motivated by the incessant failure of 4G LTE operators to deliver anticipated data rate and quality of Service (QoS) to subscribers. However, Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Area Network (E-UTRAN) is a major part of LTE System Architecture Evolution (SAE) ensuring the radio resource availability, accessibility, connectivity and link reliability of User Equipment (UE). The most critical function of the E-UTRAN is the scheduling algorithm implemented in the Evolved NodeB (eNodeB). This function is decisive for the subscribers Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). Therefore, enhancing its operations is of high importance to LTE network operators. Nonetheless, this work empirically, studied the peculiarities of SPECTRANET network and used quantitative analysis to analyze experimental voice and data Key performance indicator (KPI). The voice and data KPI was generated using Huawei Imanager 2000 tool and drive test technique was employed across troubled eNodeB regions. The performance evaluation of the existing network capacity was done and the outcome was validated using standard threshold of 3GPP Technical Specification chart on cell throughput. Also, the results obtained were used to characterize 4G LTE network and predicted network element behaviours as well as develop an implementable algorithm for enhanced QoS. It was observed after performance evaluations that small percentage (less than 20%) of subscribers consumes about 80% of the radio resources per troubled sector. Cell throughput enhancement algorithm was developed based on differential quality of service (Diff-Serv) employing Time Stamps Algorithm (TSA) and Traffic Volume Algorithm (TVA). The developed algorithms demonstrated cell throughput enhancement by 11.6% and 38.7% respectively over the existing network performance whose average cell throughput performance is at 1.9 Mbps. However at severe network conditions, the TSA and TVA achieved an average cell throughput of 0.91Mbps against 0.41 Mbps of existing network average performance. Nonetheless, the average number of users per active cell increased from average of 50 to 60 User Equipment per LTE Cell.