ng Thanh Bnh

Chapter 5
Cellular Concepts
Contents
Cellular Network Concepts
Cell Area
Signal Strength and Cell Parameters
Capacity of A Cell
Frequency Reuse
Co-channel Interference

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CELLULAR NETWORK CONCEPTS
Cellular Networks Definition
A cell is formally dened as an area wherein the
use of radio communication resources by the MS
(mobile station) is controlled by a BS (base
station).
The size and shape of the cell and the amount of
resources allocated to each cell dictate the
performance of the system to a large extent,
given the number of users, average frequency of
calls being made, average duration of call time,
and so on.
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Components of Cellular Network

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Cellular Networks Devices

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CELL AREA
Cellular Geometries
A cell is the radio coverage by a transmitting station or a
BS. All MSs in that area are connected and serviced by
the BS.
Therefore, ideally, the area covered by a BS can be
represented by a circular cell, with a radius R from the
center of the BS

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Impact of Cell Shape and Radius

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SIGNAL STRENGTH AND CELL
PARAMETERS
Signal Strength

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Actual Signal Strength

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Variation of Received Power

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Handover Concept
As the MS moves away from the BS of the cell, the
signal strength weakens, and at some point a
phenomenon known as handoff occurs (handoff is
also written as hand-off or hand off, and known as
handover outside North America).
This implies a radio connection to another
adjacent cell

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Handover Concept

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Handover Concept
Some important performance metrics in handover
Seamless user should not know handover occurring
Minimum unnecessary handover
Low probability of blocking new calls in the new cell
Handover to a good SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio)
channel so that an admitted call is not dropped

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Handover Region

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Types of Handover
Hard handover - HHO (Break before Make)
Whenever mobile enters new cell, it must be assigned
a new channel for communication.
Different radio channels are assigned during a handoff
and MS have to break connection with its current BS
before connecting to the new BS
E.g., FDMA, TDMA

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Types of Handover
Soft handover - SHO (Make before Break)
Mobile can use channels from two or more BSs
simultaneously
Mobile adds new channel from the target BS(s)
Signal from multiple BSs are combined (Macro
diversity)
Mobile concurrently transmitting to and receiving
from multiple BSs
BS with low SNR is dropped
Used mainly with CDMA (IS-95, CDMA2000 &
WCDMA)
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Handoff vs. Mobility vs. Cell Area
A rectangular cell of area and sides 1 and 2
1 is the number of MSs having handoff per unit
length in the horizontal direction
2 is the similar quantity in the vertical direction
Handoff could occur along the side 1 of the cell
or cross through the side 2 of the cell

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Handoff vs. Mobility vs. Cell Area
The number of MSs crossing along the 1 side of
the cell can be given by the component
1 (1 + 2 )
The number of MSs crossing along the 2 side of
the cell can be given by the component
2 (1 + 2 )
The total handoff rate

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Handoff vs. Mobility vs. Cell Area

Assuming that the area = 1 2 is xed, the

question is how to minimize for a given
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Handoff vs. Mobility vs. Cell Area
This is done by substituting the value of 2 =
/1 , differentiating with respect to 1 , and
equating it to zero, which gives us

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Handoff vs. Mobility vs. Cell Area
Thus we have

Last equation is minimized when = 0. We get:

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CAPACITY OF A CELL
Capacity of A Cell
The offered trafc load of a cell is typically
characterized by the following two important
random parameters:
Average number of MSs requesting the service
(average call arrival rate )
Average length of time the MSs requiring the service
(average holding time )
The offered trafc load is dened as
=

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Example
In a cell with 100 MSs, if 30 requests/hour, with
= 360 seconds, then the average request rate
(or average call arrival rate) is

A channel that is kept busy for an hour is dened

as one Erlang. Hence, the offered trafc load for
the preceding example by Erlang is

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An Arriving Call Being Blocked?
The probability P(S) of an arriving call being
blocked

S is the number of channels in a cell

= /, the offered load
: average arrival rate
: average service (departure) rate
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System Efciency

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FREQUENCY REUSE
Design of Cellular Networks
The design is done in two main steps
Area coverage planning
Outage area
Coverage area
Channel (Frequency) allocation

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Cells, Cluster and Frequency Reuse
Cells are BSs transmitting over small geographic
areas that are represented as hexagons
Size varies depending on the landscape
A cluster is a group of cells
Frequency reuse - reuse radio
frequencies (channels) to
carry more than one
conversation at a time

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Frequency Reuse Concept
An efficient way of managing the radio spectrum
is by reusing the same frequency, within the
service area, as often as possible
This frequency reuse is possible thanks to the
propagation properties of radio waves

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Frequency Reuse Concept

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Frequency Reuse Concept
Due to Co-channel Interference (CCI), we cannot
use same frequency in adjacent cells
Frequency reuse plan
Used to assign frequencies to different cells
Adjacent cells assigned different frequencies to avoid
interference or crosstalk
Main Objective is to reuse frequency in nearby cells
(but not adjacent) without interfering with each other
The issue is to determine how many cells must
intervene between two cells using the same
frequency
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Frequency Reuse Main Steps
Given a service area, A, and total number of
frequencies, S, we mainly do the following:
Form a cluster of cells, i.e. with size N cells
The total number of frequencies, S, are divided into N
groups of k frequencies each, where k<S and S=kN.
N is called reuse pattern (factor).
Each cell of the cluster is assigned one of the groups (k).
All the frequencies within the cluster are orthogonal (No
interference between cells of the same cluster)
Repeat the cluster M times over the remaining service
area until all area A is covered
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Frequency Reuse Patterns
Reuse pattern N = number of cells in a repetitious
pattern (each cell in the pattern uses a unique
band of frequencies)
Reuse Distance D = minimum distance between
centers of cells that use the same band of
frequencies (called co-channels). These cells
belong to different cluster
R = radius of a cell

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Frequency Reuse Patterns

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Frequency Reuse Patterns

D: reuse distance
R: the radius of each cell
N: the number of cells in a cluster

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Frequency Reuse Patterns
Reuse factor q:

Number of cells N per cluster:

i: the number of cells to be traversed along direction I
j: the number of cells in a direction 600 to the
direction of I
Substituting different values of i and j leads to N =
1 , 3 , 4 , 7 , 9 , 12 , 13 , 16 , 19 , 21 , 28 ,
The most popular values are 7 and 4

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Center of an adjacent cluster
Finding the center of an adjacent cluster using
integers i and j

Example: Formation of a cluster

N=7
i=2 and j=1

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 Center of an adjacent cluster
A cluster with N =13 with A Cluster with N = 19 cells
i=2 and j=2 with i=3 and j=2
Find center of an adjacent cluster
To find the nearest co-channel neighbor of a
particular cell
1. Move i cells along any chain of hexagons
2. Then turn 60 degrees counter-clockwise and
3. Move j cells.

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How To Form A Cluster
Assumptions:
i>=j
j=1 (This method is only for j=1)
Steps:
Select a cell, make the center of the cell as the origin, and
form the coordinate plane
The positive half of the u-axis and the positive half of the
v-axis intersect at a 60-degree angle.
Dene the unit distance as the distanceof centers of two
adjacent cells.
Then for each cell center, we can get an ordered pair (u, v)
to mark the position.

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How To Form A Cluster
u and v coordinate plane

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How To Form A Cluster
We have
For j=1, then:

By using
we can obtain the label L for the cell whose center
is at (u, v)

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How To Form A Cluster
For the origin cell whose center is (0, 0) , u = 0, v
= 0, we have L = 0 and label this cell as 0.
Then we compute the labels of all adjacent cells.
Finally, the cells with labels from 0 through N 1
form a cluster of N cells.
The cells with the same label can use the same
frequency bands.

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How To Form A Cluster: Ex. N=7
Example of N = 7:
Using Equation i=2

With
Computation results:

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How To Form A Cluster: Ex. N=7
Example of N = 7:

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How To Form A Cluster: Ex. N=13
Example of N = 13: i = 3 and j = 1, giving L = ( 4u +
v ) mod 13

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Cluster Example

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CO-CHANNEL INTERFERENCE
Reuse Distance (D)
How far apart can two users share the same
channel?
It depends on whether signal quality is acceptable or
not.
The larger the distance between the two users, the
better the signal quality.
How to measure signal quality?

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Signal Quality
The signal quality depends on the ratio between
signal power of the desired signal and
interference (noise) power

where S is the desired signal power (power

received from the kth interferer cell of interest
home base station), and I is the total interference
power
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Signal-to-Noise Ratio
Ratio of the power in a signal to the power
contained in the noise thats present at a
particular point in the transmission
Typically measured at a receiver
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR, or S/N)

The theoretical maximum data rate that can be

achieved is
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Co-Channel Interference
Cells using the same frequency cause interference
to each other
Called co-channel interference (CCI)

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Co-Channel Interference

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Co-Channel Interference
The co-channel interference ratio (CCIR) is given
by

is the co-channel interference from and

is the maximum number of co-channel interfering
cells

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Co-Channel Interference
For cluster size of 7, = 6, CCIR is given by

where is the propagation path loss slope and

varies between 2 and 5

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Frequency Reuse Pattern For N=3

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Techniques To Reduce CCIR
Cell splitting
Sectored antennas
Beam tilting: Reduces power to co-channel cells
Channel assignment: minimizes activation of co-
channel frequencies

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Cell Splitting
Cell splitting is process of subdividing a
congested cell into smaller cells each with its
own base station (with corresponding reduction
in antenna height and tx power)
Cell splitting increases the capacity of cellular system
since it increases the number of times the channel are
reused
Cell splitting - defining new cells which have smaller
radius than original cells by installing these smaller
cells between existing cells
Capacity increases due to additional number of
channels per unit area
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Cell Splitting

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Cell Splitting
Depending on traffic patterns, the smaller cells
may be activated/deactivated in order to
efficiently use cell resources.
Smaller cell size, smaller transmitting power, and
reduces co-channel interference
Downside of cell splitting:
Reduced capacity of the bigger cell
Increased handoffs.

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Cell Sectoring by Antenna Design
Decrease the co-channel interference and keep
the cell radius R unchanged
Replacing single omni-directional antenna by several
directional antennas
Radiating within a specified sector

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Cell Sectoring by Antenna Design

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