26-Sep-19
Cell splitting, sectoring, and coverage zone approaches
are used in practice to expand the capacity of cellular
systems.
Cell splitting allows an orderly growth of the cellular
system.
Sectoring uses directional antennas to further control
the interference and frequency reuse of channels.
The zone microcell concept distributes the coverage of a
cell and extends the cell boundary to hard-to-reach
places.
Cell splitting is the process of subdividing a congested
cell into smaller cells, each small cell has
its own base station
a reduced antenna height,
reduced transmitter power.
Cell splitting increases
the capacity of a
cellular system since it
increases the number
of times that channels
are reused.
1
26-Sep-19
For the new cells to be smaller in size, the transmit power of
these cells must be reduced.
Examine the received power 𝑃 at the new and old cell
boundaries and set them equal to each other.
𝑃 at old cell boundary ∝ 𝑃 𝑅
𝑃 at new cell boundary ∝ 𝑃 𝑅/2
If we take 𝑛 = 4 and set the received powers equal to each
other, then
𝑃 = 𝑃 /16
In practice, not all cells are split resulting in a mix of small
and large cells in an area
Therefore, special care needs to be taken to keep the
distance between co-channel cells at the required minimum,
and hence channel assignments become more complicated
Sectoring is used to increase the capacity by using
directional antennas that reduce SIR and then
increasing the frequency reuse.
A cell is normally partitioned into three 120° sectors or
six 60° sectors
2
26-Sep-19
Assuming seven-cell reuse, for the case of 120° sectors,
The number of interferers in the first tier is reduced
from six to two.
The resulting S/I for this case
can be found using Equation
= to be 24.2 dB,
∑
which is a significant
improvement over the
omnidirectional case where the
worst case S/I was shown to be
17 dB.
This S/I improvement allows
the wireless engineer to
decrease the cluster size N in
order to improve the frequency
reuse, and system capacity.
Sectoring reduces interference, which amounts to an
increase in capacity by a factor of 12/17, or 1.714.
The disadvantage is
an increased number of antennas at each base station,
a decrease in trunking efficiency
increase in number of handoffs
Decrease in trunking efficiency is a big disadvantage
due to which many operators do not use this method.
It happens because
Sectoring uses more than one antenna per base station, the
available channels in the cell must be subdivided and
dedicated to a specific antenna.
This breaks up the available trunked channel pool into
several smaller pools, and decreases trunking efficiency.
3
26-Sep-19
Example 3.9 : Consider a cellular system in which an
average call lasts two minutes, and the probability of
blocking is to be no more than 1%. Assume that every
subscriber makes one call per hour, on average. If there
are a total of 395 traffic channels for a seven-cell reuse
system. Assume that blocked calls are cleared
The unsectored system may handle:
44.2 Erlangs or 1326 calls per hour
Employing 120˚ sectoring each sector can handle
11.2 Erlangs or 336 calls per hour.
Since each cell consists of three sectors, this provides a cell
capacity of 3 x 336 = 1008 calls per hour,
This amounts to a 24% decrease when compared to the
unsectored case.
Thus, sectoring decreases the trunking efficiency while
improving the S/I for each user in the system.
Repeaters, are often used to provide such range extension
capabilities to provide dedicated coverage for hard-to-reach
areas, such as within buildings, or in valleys or tunnels.
Repeaters are bidirectional in nature, and simultaneously
send signals to and receive signals from a serving base
station.
Upon receiving signals from a base station forward link, the
repeater amplifies and reradiates the base station signals to
the specific coverage region.
The received noise and interference is also amplified and
reradiated by the repeater on both the forward and reverse
link,
So care must be taken to properly place the repeaters, and
to adjust the various forward and reverse link amplifier
levels and antenna patterns.
4
26-Sep-19
The increased number of handoffs required when
sectoring is employed results in an increased load on
the switching and
control link
elements of the
mobile system.
A solution to
this problem is
using zones in a
microcell
As a mobile travels from one zone to another within the
cell, it retains the same channel.
Thus, a handoff is not required at the MSC.
The base station simply switches the channel to a
different zone site.
The advantage of the zone cell technique are:
the cell maintains a particular coverage radius,
the co-channel interference in the cellular system is reduced
since a large central base station is replaced by several
lower powered transmitters (zone transmitters) on the edges
of the cell,
decreased co-channel interference improves the signal
quality
an increase in capacity
no degradation in trunking efficiency caused by sectoring.
Zone cell architectures are being adopted in many
cellular communication systems.
