Resource: Guidelines for LTE Backhaul Traffic Estimation [NGMN]

 
A white paper by the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance, describes a "A model is developed to predict traffic levels in transport networks used to backhaul LTE eNodeBs. Backhaul traffic is made up of a number of different components of which user plane data is the largest, comprising around 80-90% of overall traffic, slightly less when IPsec encryption is added. The remainder consists of the transport protocol overhead and traffic forwarding to another base-station during handover. Network signalling, management and synchronisation were assumed to be negligible".

"Figure 13 shows transport provisioning curves for the ‘vanilla’ LTE with 2x2 downlink and 1x2 uplink configurations for both 10MHz and 20MHz system bandwidths. X-axis scales are given for both tricell and single cell eNodeBs. Provisioning curves for other eNodeB configurations are given in the report. IPsec encryption would increase these provisioning figures by 14%. Curves in Figure 13 represent a general case for fully loaded eNodeBs. Actual traffic levels for individual eNodeBs may vary about these levels depending on the deployment scenario and loading level"

"Overall, this study shows that although LTE is capable of generating some very high peak rates, when the traffic of multiple cells and/or eNodeBs are aggregated together, the transport provisioning requirements are quite reasonable".

See "Guidelines for LTE Backhaul Traffic Estimation" - here.