TP Radio planning (4TC-RAN)

I gave a practical class on radio planning to 4th year engineering students at INSA Lyon, department telecommunications.

This class is about radio planning and the several challenges operators face before and during the deployment of a cellular network.

I was designed to give two sessions of this course :

• GSM radio planning using Atoll
• LTE radio planning using Atoll

The GSM subject already existed and I only modernized the version made by Pr. Jean-Marie GORCE.

I wrote the subject for LTE deployment from scratch, with the help of Jean-Marie GORCE and Lélio CHETOT

Both these sessions rely on Atoll, a radio planning software developed by Forsk, where I worked for 1 year.

GSM radio planning

In this class, the goal is to place the student in the shoes of a radio planning engineer working for a national operator. Using a preconfigured project centered on Chicago, the students must understand the different ruling the deployment of a cellular GSM network, and how to model it in a software : propagation models, interference computation and frequency allocation are at the heart of this practical work.

LTE radio planning

Coming after the first class on GSM, the LTE session aims at showing the utility of radio planning software such as Atoll. We show the students automatic PCI allocation, automatic pan/tilt adjustments and quality of service estimation based on Monte-Carlo simulations. Ultimately, each team of students have to make the best proposition for a deployment in Chicago, starting from a blank page.