Planning and Optimizing Mobile Backhaul for LTE

Planning the mobile backhaul network for long‐term evolution (LTE) is rarely done without considering the available backhaul infrastructure or other radio access technologies. This chapter concentrates on the high‐level planning tasks that define the overall guidance, for example, for resiliency planning, quality of service (QoS), dimensioning, routing and subnetting. It presents an introduction to backhaul network deployment scenarios using various technologies, presenting a couple of examples. The chapter describes transport media selection effects on the network topologies and discusses two methods for bandwidth dimensioning and synchronization planning. Transport network needs to support self‐organizing networks (SON) auto‐connection and automatic neighbor management. The chapter briefly describes the site where eNBs are installed and the relevant backhaul equipment and their functionality at that site. It describes different concepts for performance monitoring and how these can be applied to the mobile network and to backhaul optimization.