Practical Aspects of LTE Network Design and Deployment

This paper covers the practical aspects of commercial long term evolution (LTE) network design and deployment. The end-to-end architecture of the LTE network and different deployment scenarios are presented. Moreover, the LTE coverage and link budget aspects are discussed in details. Theoretical and practical throughputs of LTE system are analyzed. In addition, capacity dimensioning of LTE system is explained in details and compared with the evolved high-speed packet access (HSPA+) system. Additionally, the quality of service (QoS) of the LTE system and the end-to-end implementation scenarios along with testing results are presented. Finally, the latency of the LTE system is analyzed and compared with the HSPA+ system. This paper can be used as a reference for best practices in LTE network design and deployment.