Question:

(a) What are the criteria that a frequency planner and a network engineer need to consider during cellular planning and design.

(b) Assuming that you work as a cellular network designer for an operator. You have been given the job to select types of antennae for base stations. Explain which antenna is most probably the appropriate one and why.

(c) Differentiate between hard handover and soft handover in mobile communication.

(d) Assume that a large-scale cellular network is being set up to service a sparsely populated, flat area. Two FDMA cellular network systems are being considered for application, and there is a total of 840 kHz of spectrum available (420 kHz for the uplink, and 420 kHz for the downlink).

One proposed system (system A) has a requirement for a carrier to interference ratio of 10 dB, and requires 20 kHz of bandwidth for each user. The second system (system B) has a requirement for a carrier to interference ratio of 17 dB, but only requires 7.5 kHz of bandwidth per user.

Which scheme provides the best spectrum capacity?