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People living in rural areas need broadband connection for services such as egovernance, virtual class rooms, telemedicine, video-on-demand, home entertainment. Therefore, the need for high speed broadband connection in rural areas is inevitable. However, in order to provide broadband services, service providers must incur high deployment cost and wait for a long time for return on investments. Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been proposed to overcome high deployment cost, although it has some coverage limitation in rural areas. Thus, massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) with its favorable propagation phenomenon can be exploited as an alternative to boost signal coverage in rural areas. Therefore, this studyevaluated the performance of a broadband network for Tanzanian rural areas based on massive MIMO technology. Massive MIMO based network was planned and simulated using Infovista Planet, a radio planning tool at 2.1 GHz carrier frequency for selected Dodoma rural areas in Tanzania. Moreover, scenarios for performance evaluation were createdbased on 5 MHz, 10 MHz and 20 MHz channel bandwidths. Further, a comparison to conventional LTE at 700 MHz carrier frequency at the same channel bandwidths was carried out in this study. Performance evaluation of planned network was based on three metrics namely;Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP), Signal-toInterference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) and downlink (DL) throughput observed by user. Based on simulation results, it has been found that massive MIMO network performs better at 5 MHz bandwidth in terms of RSRP and SINRu when compared to other two higher channel bandwidths (10 MHz and 20 MHz). Moreover, only vi three cell sites are required to cover an area of 43.5125km2 in which conventional LTE would coverwith five (5) cell sites. |
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