In cellular radio networks, the selection of antenna parameters and techniques for antennas plays a key role for capacity and coverage area. Not only network performance is affected by suboptimal network planning but also it is affected by the dynamic radio environment. Therefore, antenna parameters should be adjusted adaptively. Since reacting to the changed situation manually is very expensive and time consuming, The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduced the Coverage and Capacity Optimization (CCO) use case for Long Term Evolution (LTE) under the topic of Self-Organizing Network (SON).
This thesis work provides a detailed analysis of the optimization space of antenna parameters and compares different tilt techniques as well as discusses vertical sectorization as a novel capacity optimization approach. The work continues by further focusing on the self optimization of coverage and capacity using Adaptive Antenna Systems (AAS) on the basis of findings in the previous simulations on antenna parameters.
Evaluations are performed by mapping link-level simulation results into a system level LTE simulator that models antennas in details and propagation in three dimensions
