PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF LONG TERM EVOLUTION ADVANCED NETWORK WITH AND WITHOUT DISTRIBUTED ANTENNA SYSTEMS

Abstract

Over the past decades, wireless cellular networks have experienced tremendous evolutional growth. However, providing sufficient coverage and capacity for indoor users has always been a major challenge for mobile network providers. Despite the fact that Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) systems facilitate high speed data services, poor indoor coverage and interference still diminish the quality of real-time data services as well as the throughput performance of LTE-A in indoor scenarios. In solving this problem, the study reported in this thesis investigates the efficiency of Distributed Antenna System (DAS) in overcoming mobile signal reduction in indoor environment. This was achieved by developing two algorithms with and without DAS using tree topology deployment of active DAS. The developed algorithms were then evaluated using two major wireless communication performance indices. The performance evaluation result shows that the algorithm with DAS outperforms the one without DAS with improved Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of about 7.3% in the Line of Sight (LOS) propagation and about 5.7% in the Non Line of Sight (NLOS) propagation. In addition, the overall performance evaluation result obtained shows that the DAS technologies effectively improves the performance of LTE-A in both indoor and outdoor environments