User-Location Aware Downlink Performance Analysis of LTE Networks

In order to evaluate the performance of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, system-level simulation with detailed focus on network related effects such as mobility, scheduling and interference management must be emphasized. Existing studies evaluate user throughput and dimension LTE networks usually assuming uniform distribution of users within the cell. These studies report average user throughputs over the cell and the 5th percentile throughputs as estimates of the performance of the users at the cell edge. In this thesis, we have extended an existing state-of-the-art simulation framework to take user locations into account and to validate the current performance measures. In particular, taking the locations of users into consideration may be important when estimating the throughput of users at the edge of an LTE cell. In addition, the distribution of user locations within a cell may not be expected to be uniform as it is generally assumed in existing studies. As a result, a clustered deployment of mobile users is also analyzed in order to compare performance results with the existing ones. With the extended user-location aware simulator, it is observed that 5th percentile throughput may be incompatible with cell edge throughputs and non-uniform user distributions may result in very different performance measures. Keywords: Cell Edge Performance, Clustered Mobile Users, Long Term Evolution (LTE), System-Level Simulation.