The Future of 5G Urban Wireless
Network Design

5G is set to revolutionise the way we communicate, collaborate and exchange data. The 5G New Radio (NR) system will support enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC).

5G NR is far more complex than previous generations of mobile networks and will still need to work together with current 4G LTE and WiFi radio access technologies (RATs), leading to challenges in network planning.

Our suite of tools can help you to plan your 5G NR network to address these challenges and ensure that your network is optimised early on in the planning and design phase to help ensure reliable network performance and excellent quality of experience for end users.

Ranplan Professional 5.2

Find out more about the latest version.

5G New Radio Network Planning | Whitepaper

Use Ranplan Professional to help you plan, design & optimise reliable 5G NR networks

Ranplan Professional 5.2, the latest release of Ranplan’s flagship radio network planning tool, now supports the key features in 5G New Radio (NR) specified by 3GPP, including:

  • Massive MIMO
  • Millimetre wave communications
  • Ultra-dense small cell and heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployments
  • New 5G services such as VR/AR.

Radio network planners can use the latest Ranplan Professional release to plan and optimise 5G NR networks in coordination with other networks based on 2G/3G/4G/NB-IoT/WiFi radio access technologies (RATs).

Radio network planners can use Ranplan Professional to plan and optimise 5G NR networks in true hybrid indoor and outdoor scenarios. This means that they can lay the outdoor networks on GIS and indoor networks on building structures in 3D, and plan and optimise outdoor and indoor 5G NR in coordination.

Ranplan’s 5G planning capabilities

5G NR Compliance
5G Radio Propagation Modelling
Network Performance Analysis

Ranplan Professional complies with 5G NR specified in 3GPP Release 15, and supports:

  • Both NSA and SA deployments
  • All 5G NR frequency bands
  • Multi-layer deployments, i.e., coverage, coverage and capacity, and super data layers
  • All 5G NR duplexing modes (TDD, FDD, SUL, and SDL)
  • All 5G NR numerology (e.g., sub-carrier spacing, symbol duration, CP, BW, FFT size, TTI)
  • All 7 MIMO modes (e.g., MU-MIMO and beamforming)
  • Massive MIMO and 3D-MIMO
  • Carrier aggregations (intra- and inter-band, cross-RATs)
  • Inter-working between 5G NR with 2G/3G/4G/NB-IoT/WiFi networks
  • 5G new services such as VR/AR and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services.

Ranplan’s radio propagation engine is tailored to provide the best support for 5G radio propagation scenarios and includes the following features:

  • It is based on true 3D ray tracing/launching algorithms
  • It supports all foreseen 5G spectrum for multi-layer 5G networks
  • It is integrated with a building material electromagnetic property database for frequencies up to 70GHz
  • It supports MIMO, massive MIMO and 3D-MIMO
  • It works in indoor, outdoor, indoor to outdoor and outdoor to indoor scenarios.

Ranplan Professional 5.2 supports 21 KPIs for 5G NR: SS RSRP, SS SINR, SS RSRQ, CSI RSRP, CSI SINR, CSI RSRQ, SRS RSRP and SRS SINR.

The above 5G NR KPIs can be analysed by the built-in radio propagation engine as well as the semi-dynamic Monte Carlo simulator in Ranplan Professional. The analysis of these KPIs will give radio network planners realistic insights of how 5G NR network will perform in indoor, outdoor and joint indoor-outdoor scenarios and in coordination with multi-RAT networks.