UMTS CE Consumption - Uplink and Downlink

Uplink CE consumption is more than that of downlink. The reason is that CEs are not utilized  by HSDPA being a shared channel. HSUPA and R99, on the other hand, consume dedicated CS resources for their respective sessions.

UMTS - Analysis for Second Carrier Expansion

Second Carrier expansion can be proposed if there is low user throughput due to high number of users. One way of finding Node B/Cells that requires such an expansion is presented below. Extract the cell hourly level performance statistics of last 10 days and check for below criteria:

• RoT (Rise Over Thermal) >= 6dB and Cell DCH users >= 16
• HS User Throughout is less than 500 kbps and Average HSDPA users are larger than 16
• Non HSDPA TCP Utilization avg >=55% or max>=90%  and Cell DCH users >=16 

If these conditions are fulfilled by cells in at least 10 hours, the cell should be recommended for second carrier expansion. 

Note that second carrier expansion will not increase the peak user throughput, but the average user throughput is enhanced and so is the user QoS. The peak throughput is 21 Mbps for UMTS, however with Dual Carrier technology, the theoretical throughput limit is increased to as high as 42 Mbps.