Spectrum estimation methodology for next generation wireless systems

A new methodology for calculating the spectrum demand for next generation wireless communication systems is presented. The methodology considers a cell or cell cluster carrying the traffic of a mix of packet based services, taking the multiplexing gain of packet based traffic and the service-specific QoS parameters mean throughput, mean delay and delay percentile into account. A suitable balance between accuracy and complexity has to be found. Accordingly, two approaches of different complexity are presented. A very simple approach maps the expected offered packet traffic to the required system capacity by exploiting a characteristic of the relation between system load and system throughput that is common to all packet-based systems. A second approach is based on the analysis of a queuing system. The required system capacity is calculated for services with mean throughput and mean delay requirements. Using an additional iterative procedure also delay percentile requirements can be taken into account. The queuing approach is more complex but also significantly more accurate than the simple approach.