ECE-T512 – Wireless

Systems
Link Budget/Receiver Sensitivity
Receiver Sensitivity/Link Budget
• Receiver Sensitivity refers to the ability of the
receiver to detect radio signals.
• Receivers must detect radio signals in the
presence of noise
– External: Atmospheric (lightning), cosmic, man-made
(e.g. automobile ignition)
– Internal: Thermal noise
• Ratio of desired signal power to thermal noise
power before detection is carrier to noise ratio,

Receiver Sensitivity/Link Budget
•
is a function of link parameters such as:
– Transmitter power
– Path loss
– Antenna gains
– Effective input-noise temperature of receiver
• Link Budget - Formula relating above
parameters to

 Link Budget (in Watts – linear
scale)
Pt Gt Gr Pt/r = transmit/receive power
Pr = Gt/r = transmit/receive antenna gains
Lrx L path
Lp = Path loss
N = kT0 Bw F Lrx = receiver losses
N = input noise
Pr Carrier to k = Boltzman’s constant

= Noise Ratio
N T0 = noise temperature
Bw = noise bandwidth
Ec Bw Modulated F = noise figure – degradation of
=
Symbol Signal
SNR from input to output
N0 Rc to Noise Ratio (Typical 5-6 dB)
 Ec 
= carrier to noise ratio
S rx = Lrx kT0 FRc   Ec = energy per modulated signal
 N0  min N0 = PSD of white noise
Rc = modulated symbol rate
Srx = receiver sensitivity
 Maximum Allowable Path Loss
Ec Pt G t G r
Ec 
= Srx = L rx kT0 FR c  
N 0 kT0 R c FL rx L path  N 0  min
Using logarithmic scale, in dB:

 Ec 
  t ( dB) G t ( dB) G r ( dB) kT0 ( dBm / Hz ) R c ( dBHz ) F( dB) L rx ( dB) L path ( dB)
=P + +





 N0  dB

 Ec 
Srx rx ( dB) kT0 ( dBm / Hz ) R c ( dBHz ) F( dB)  
=L + + + +
( dB ) 
 N0  dB

Typical design process:

1. Find minimum Ec/N0 – From knowledge of modulation and coding
2. Solve for Srx and then solve for Lpath to find maximum allowable path loss:

L path,max ( dB )
=P
t ( dB)
+G
t ( dB)
+G
r ( dB)

S Can be translated to distance
rx ( dBm ) to find maximum cell radius
 Additional Link Budget Parameters
• Margin for system loading -- Interference Loading/Margin
• Shadow margin
• Handoff gain
First two factors reduce maximum allowable path loss, LMAX, but the third
increases it

Reducing LMAX corresponds to decreasing design specification of cell range

Current discussion is around relative link budget adjustments (for comparing

different system concepts)
Absolute maximum allowable path loss requires other factors specific to the
system (coding techniques, use of arrays, etc.)
 Interference Loading / Margin
• Cell breathing - Cell size fluctuation caused by varying subscriber load causing
different levels of co-channel interference and adjacent channel interference
• Interference Margin introduced into link budget to account for system
degradation due to high traffic --- otherwise coverage will be increasingly poor
near planned cell boundaries
• Near/far effect - power control
• If CCI and ACI are assumed to be white noise (accurate for these purposes) the
net effect of cell breathing effects will be to increase total noise power by
multiplicative factor of LI (Interference Margin)
•To account for Interference Loading, we reduce LMAX by LI (both in dB scale)
•Required LI is a function of the ability of the system to deal with interference
• In general LI is greater for CDMA (more interference limited) than TDMA
(where overlapping BW not used)
• Recall: Reducing LMAX corresponds to decreasing design specification of
cell range
 Shadow Margin
• To maintain an acceptable outage probability in the presence of shadowing
effects, we introduce shadow margin
• Quality of radio link is acceptable only when received signal power is greater
than a threshold
• Edge outage probability - Probability that received power is less than threshold
at cell edge

• Area outage probability - Probability that received power is less than threshold
power averaged over entire cell area

• MSHAD is the value reducing maximum allowable path loss (decreasing cell
design range) to maintain acceptable outage probability when shadowing effects
are taken into account
 Handoff Gain
• Macrodiversity concept - Link to serving basestation may be shadowed such
that the power from the serving basestation is below a critical threshold ---
however, the link to an adjacent basestation may be above threshold

• Handoff reduces required shadow margin (of a single cell) by Handoff Gain - GHO
• Hard handoff - Different radio channels assigned by a neighboring
basestation to takeover handling of mobile user call (TDMA systems)
• Soft handoff - Mobile switching center selects between instantaneous
received signals from a variety of basestations (CDMA systems)