TABLE OF CONTENTS In Chap. 25 we discussed signaling capacity for the cellular network. In this chapter we discuss the remaining capacity issues: transport capacity and capacity for various equipment components of the cellular network. Some of these design issues involve traffic engineering, whereas others require different tools for capacity estimation or calculation.
The transport that connects the base stations to the mobile switching center (MSC) is called backhaul. In the analog days, the backhaul network consisted of dedicated analog trunks, one for each voice radio. The base stations were already traffic engineered with enough radios for the quantity and quality of service required, and each radio required a trunk, so there was no traffic engineering issue for backhaul. The backhaul in code division multiple access (CDMA) networks is not only digital but also digital packet data pipes. Voice links become virtual circuits between the base station and the MSC. This is a more efficient transport technology, and it gives us the opportunity to do some traffic engineering in backhaul.
Backhaul from hundreds of base stations to a single MSC is a complex transport network. We could satisfy the transport demand with a separate pipe from each base station to the MSC and have no interaction among these separate pipes. However, the cost saving of designing an efficient backhaul network can be quite large. There are economies of scale in transport: Doubling the capacity of a pipe between two points often costs far less than twice as...
