Analytic uplink cell load approximation for planning fractional power control in LTE networks

Fractional Power Control (FPC) has recently been standardized for the uplink in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) of Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS) radio networks. The behavior of FPC is mainly governed by two cell specific parameters, the path loss compensation factor and the power offset. Radio network operators face the problem to plan these parameters for LTE network deployments. In this work we establish a system of cell equations for the uplink cell loads and blocking probabilities, taking these FPC parameters, irregular cell areas, service specific user distributions, and mutual cell interference into account. The equations describe the situation when the achieved uplink connection bandwidths follow a generalized Shannon-Hartley capacity law. We suggest to use solutions of these equations for planning and optimizing the FPC cell parameters of LTE networks. We develop such an optimization procedure with three consecutive stages and present numerical results for an example network.