Dimensioning of an Enhanced 4G/B3G Infrastructure for Voice Traffic

Abstract:
The course of migration from third generation networks (3G) to fourth generation or beyond third generation (4G/B3G) networks is strewn with challenges to offer anytype service - anytime, anywhere and anyhow. The objectives of this paper are two-fold: Firstly to define our enhanced 4G/B3G network architecture and secondly to dimension it. In this regard, we give an overview of our enhanced 4G/B3G architecture topology and compare its salient features with the corresponding features of other key 4G/B3G architectures examined by us from the literature. A review is provided of some of the work that has been conducted for achieving an efficient network dimensioning of a 3G packet switched network that offers integrated multimedia services. The network dimensioning of our enhanced 4G/B3G architecture deals with the dimensioning of the radio access network as well as of the core network elements. For both dimensioning processes we have considered voice only traffic so as to ensure that the infrastructure has sufficient number of elements to handle at least voice service whenever there is an outage of other services. This consideration also enables us to apply the Erlang-B formula.