The Cellular Concept

Chapter 2 The Cellular Concept

Engr . Munawwar Anwar Engr . Naveed Jan

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2.1 The Cellular Concept

Everyone is familiar with the usage of the term cellular in describing mobile radio systems. You probably know that it is called cellular because the network is composed of a number of cells. Mobile radio systems work on the basis of cells for two reasons. The first reason is that radio signals at the frequencies used for cellular travel only a few kilometers (kms) from the point at which they are transmitted. They travel more or less equal distances in all directions; hence, if one transmitter is viewed in isolation, the area around it where a radio signal can be received is typically approximately circular. If the network designer Figure-2.1 wants to cover a large area, then he must have a number of transmitters positioned so that when one gets to the edge of the first cell there is a second cell overlapping slightly, providing radio signal. Hence the construction of the network is a series of approximately circular cells. This is shown in Figure-2.1 The second reason has to do with the availability of something called radio spectrum. Simply, radio spectrum is what radio signals use to travel through space. Whenever a conversation takes place using a mobile radio system, it consumes a certain amount of radio spectrum for the duration of the call. An analogy here is car parks. When you park your car in a car park it takes up a parking space. When you leave the car park, the space becomes free for someone else to use. The number of spaces in the car park is strictly limited and when there are as many cars as there are spaces nobody else can use the car park until someone leaves. Radio spectrum in any particular cell is rather like this. However, there is an important difference. Once you move far enough away from the first cell, the radio signal will have become much weaker and so the same bit of radio spectrum can be reused in another cell without the two interfering with each other. By this means, the same bit of radio spectrum can be reused several times around the country. So splitting the network into a number of small cells increases the number of users who can make telephone calls around the country. This is explained in much greater detail later on. So, in summary, cellular radio systems are often called cellular because the network is composed of a number of cells, each with radius of a few kilometers, spread across the country. This is necessary because the radio signal does not travel long distances from the transmitter, but it is also desirable because it allows the radio frequency to be reused, thus increasing the capacity of the network. In the beginning, mobile systems were developed much like radio or television broadcasting (i.e., a large area was covered by installing a single, high-power transmitter in a tower situated at the highest point in the area). A single high-power transmitter mobile radio system gave good coverage with a small number of simultaneous conversations depending on the number of channels Nc. The (Nc +1) caller was blocked. Those systems were also characterized by the lack of handoff. To increase the number of simultaneous conversations, a large area can be divided into a large number of small areas, Na. Each small area is called a cell. To cover a cell, a single low-power transmitter is required. If every cell uses the same frequency that is available for a large area, and its available bandwidth is divided into the number of channels, Nc, then instead of Nc simultaneous conversations for a large

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area, there would be Nc simultaneous conversations for each cell. Thus, now there can be (Na * Nc) simultaneous conversations in the entire large area as compared with only Nc The idea of using the same frequency in all the cells does not work because of the interference between mobile terminals operating on the same channel in adjacent cells. Therefore, the same frequency cannot be used in each cell, and it is necessary to skip a few cells before the same frequency is used. Cellular concept is illustrated in Figure-2.2 The cellular concept, therefore, is a wireless system designed by dividing a large area into several small cells, replacing a single, high-power transmitter in a large area with a single, low-power transmitter in each cell, and reusing the frequency of a cell to another cell after skipping several cells. Figure 2.2 Thus, the limited bandwidth is reused in distant cells, causing a virtually infinite multiplication of the available frequency.

2.2 Frequency Reuse

The cellular structure was introduced due to capacity problems of mobile communication systems. In a cellular radio system, the area covered by the mobile radio system is divided into cells. In theory, the cells are considered hexagonal, but in practice they are less regular in shape. The hexagon shape is conceptual and is a simplistic model of the radio coverage for each base station, but it has been universally adopted since the hexagon permits easy and manageable analysis of a cellular system. The actual radio coverage is known as the footprint and is determined from the field measurements or propagation prediction model. Although the real footprint is amorphous in nature, a regular cell shape is needed for systematic system design and adaptation for future growth. While it might seem natural to choose a circle to represent the coverage area of base station, adjacent circles cannot be overlaid upon a map without leaving gaps or creating overlapping regions. Thus when considering geometric shapes which cover an entire region without overlap and with equal area, there are three sensible, a square, an equilateral triangle and a hexagon. A cell must be designed to serve the weakest mobiles within the footprint, and these are typically located at the edge of the cell. For a given distance between the center of the polygon and its farthest perimeter points, the hexagon has the largest area of the three. Thus by using the hexagon geometry, the fewest number of cells can cover a geographic region and the hexagon closely approximates a circular radiation pattern which would occur for an omni-directional base station antenna and free space propagation. Of course, the actual cellular footprint is determined by the contour in which a given transmitter serves the mobiles successfully. Each cell contains a base station, which is connected to the mobile switching center (MSC). This MSC is connected to the fixed telecommunication system the public switched telephone network (PSTN). MSC serves as the central coordinator and controller for the cellular radio system and as the interface between mobile and PSTN. The cellular radio user in

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a car or train or in the street picks up a handset, dials a number, and immediately can talk to the person he or she called. Each cell is assigned a part of the available frequency spectrum. Cellular radio systems offer the possibility of using the same part of the frequency spectrum more than once. This is called frequency reuse. Cells with identical channel frequencies (i.e., the same part of the frequency spectrum) are called co-channel cells. The co-channel cells have to be sufficiently separated to avoid interference. The distance between these co-channel cells is achieved by the creation of a cluster of cells. As explained earlier, cells with identical numbers make use of the same part of the frequency spectrum. To understand a frequency reuse concept, consider a cellular system which has a total of S duplex channels available for use. If each cell is allocated a group of K channels (K<S), and if the S channels are divided among N cells into unique and disjoint channel groups which each have the same number of channels, the total number of available radio channels can be expressed as S = KN The N cells which collectively use the complete set of available frequencies is called a cluster. If a cluster is replicated M times within the system, the total number of duplex channels C can be used as a measure of capacity and is given by C = MKN = MS The capacity of cellular system is directly proportional to the number of times a cluster is replicated in a fixed service area. The factor N is called the cluster size and is typically equal to 4,7,12. If the cluster size N is reduced while the cell size is kept constant, more clusters are required to cover a given area and hence more capacity (a larger value of C) is achieved. A large cluster size indicates that the ratio between the cell radius and the distance between the co-channel cells is small. Conversely a small cluster size indicated that the co-channel cells are located much closer together. The value for N is a function of how much interference a mobile or base station can tolerate while maintaining a sufficient quality of communication. From design viewpoint, the smallest possible value of N is desirable in order to maximize the capacity over a given coverage region. The frequency re-use factor of a cellular system is given by 1/N, since each cell within a cluster is only assigned 1/N of total available channels in the system. Due to the fact that the hexagon geometry has exactly six equidistant neighbours and that the lines joining the centres of any cell and each of its neighbours are separated by multiples of 60 degrees, there are only certain cluster sizes and cell layouts which are possible. In order to tessellate--to connect without gaps between adjacent cells---the geometry of hexagon is such that the number of cells per clusters N, can only have values which satisfy equation N = i2 + ij + j2 Where i and j are nonnegative integers. To find the nearest co-channel neighbors of a particular cell, one must do the following: (1) move i cells along any chain of hexagons and then (2) turn 60 degrees counter-clockwise and move j cells

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Figure 2.3

An important design parameter denoting the amount of frequency reuse in a certain area is called the normalized reuse distance. The normalized reuse distance, Ru is defined as the ratio of the reuse distance, D, between the centers of the nearest co-channel cells and the cell radius, R, as shown in Figure-2.4. Hence,

The relationship between Ru and N can be given by

N N

Figure-2.4

2.3 Signals-to-Noise Ratio

The interfacing caused by neighboring cells is measured as the signal-to-noise ratio:

This ratio of the useful signal to the interfering signal is usually measured in decibels (dB) and called the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). The intensity of the interference is essentially a function of co-channel interference depending on the frequency reuse distance D. From the viewpoint of a mobile station, the co-channel interference is caused by base stations at distance D from the current base station. A worst-case estimate for the signal-to-noise ratio

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W of a mobile station at the border of the covered area at distance R from the base station can be obtained, subject to propagation losses, by assuming that all six neighboring interfering transmitters operate at the same power and are approximately equally far apart (distance D large against cell radius R)

By neglecting the noise N we obtain the following approximation for the Carrier-toInterference Ratio C/I (CIR):

Therefore the signal-to-noise ratio depends essentially on the ratio of the cell radius R to the frequency reuse distance D. From these considerations it follows that for a desired or needed signal-to-noise ratio W at a given cell radius, one must choose a minimum distance for the frequency reuse, above which the co-channel interference fall below the required threshold.

2.4 Why different systems have a different cluster size

Up till now it has been said that if you travel far enough for the radio signal to become undetectable and then move as far again, then you can put in another cell. It might be imagined that this distance will be the same regardless of the radio system because it is related to propagation laws, not radio system design. In fact, this is a slight simplification. You only need to travel far enough for the radio system to fall to a level where it will not interfere with another radio system. This is the same effect as the two speakers in the same room. You do not need to move the other speaker so far away that you cannot hear them at all in order to be able to have a conversation. Moving them away so that they are much quieter than you, although still audible, is quite sufficient. Mobile radio systems have a key specification, called the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) that specifies just how quiet the other speaker needs to be before they do not pose a problem. A typical SIR might be around 10. So when you have moved far enough away that the signal level has fallen to a tenth of the minimum signal level that would be experienced at the edge of the cell, if you move as far away again then you can put in another base station reusing the same frequency. It so happens that the distance you need to move is very sensitive to the SIR. A system with a SIR of 100 would have a reuse distance much greater than one with a SIR of 10, resulting in a much greater cluster size and hence less efficient use of radio frequencies. The actual SIR that a system can tolerate depends on a number of factors, key amongst which is the tolerance of the voice coder to errors on the radio channel and the power of the error correction system that is used. So it can be that different systems can have quite different SIRs hence require quite different distances between the frequencies being reused and hence have quite different cluster sizes.

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2.5 Why one channel can serve many users

If you were designing a supermarket, how many checkouts would you have? You might start with the total population of the town. But you know that not all of them will go shopping at the same time. However, you do know that perhaps one in every five will do their shopping on a Friday night. Only a few of those in the supermarket at any time are actually queuing at the checkout. You might go to a neighboring town of similar size and count the number of people going into the supermarket every minute on Friday night. The checkouts need to be able to handle this many people per minute otherwise queues will develop. If you count an average of 10 people going in per minute and time the average person to take 2 minutes at the checkout, then you need 20 minutes of checkout time for every minute of real time, or 20 checkouts. Then you notice that in one minute 15 people go in while in the next minute only five go in. The average, as you noted earlier, over a period of an hour is still 10, but people do not arrive perfectly evenly spaced apart. What should you do now? You could increase the number of checkout minutes to 30 (i.e., have 30 checkouts) to cope with the peak demand, but then when there were only five people, two-thirds of the checkouts would be idle. It is at this point that you might start thinking that a little science would be useful. This is an identical problem to the world of mobile radio. Not everyone makes a phone call at the same time; some make a lot, others hardly ever call. If the average user is only on the phone for10%of the time, then you could share a single channel amongst 10 users. But if you did this you run the risk that two of them will try to use the channel at the same time and one will get a network busy message. If this happens too often your users will migrate to a competitors network. This problem was studied in detail by Swedish engineer A. K. Erlang in the early part of the twentieth century. The results he obtained are used in the design of all telecommunication networks. Erlang studied what happened as you varied the number of users that you tried to fit onto a channel and discovered, not unsurprisingly, that the more users you tried to fit onto the channel, the higher the chance that each user would not be able to access the channel, which he termed being blocked. He went much further than this. He found that if you had a set of channels, perhaps 10, and you grouped them all together so that if a subscriber wanted to make a call they were able to use any one of these channels that were free, then the probability of them being blocked was reduced. (This is equivalent to being able to use any of the checkouts in the supermarket.) This seems intuitively reasonable. Say in your supermarket, for no good reason, you decided to split the checkouts into two groups. When a customer came into the supermarket you alternatively assigned them to the left group or the right group of checkouts. Now in some cases, a lot of the shoppers in the right group will finish at the same time and there will be queues in the right group but checkouts free in the left group. If you had not restricted the shoppers in any way, this would not have happened and there would have been fewer queues.

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In the same way, the more radio channels and users that can be put together in one pool, the less the likelihood that they will be blocked.

2.6 Handover/Handoff Mechanism

Handover, also known as handoff, is a process to switch an ongoing call from one cell to the adjacent cell as a mobile user approaches the cell boundary. Figure-2.5 shows that as the user moves from cell 1 to cell 2, the channel frequencies will be automatically changed from the set f1 to the set f2. Handover is an automatic process, if the signal strength falls below a threshold level. It is not noticed by the user because it happens very quicklywithin 200 to 300 ms The need for a handover may be caused by radio, operation and management (O&M), or by traffic. Radio causes the majority of handover requests. The parameters involved are low signal level or high error rate. This can be caused by a mobile moving out of a cell or signal blocking by objects.

Figure-2.5

O&M-generated handovers are rare. They evolve from the maintenance of equipment, equipment failure, and channel rearrangement. Handovers due to unevenly distributed traffic may cause some mobiles at the border of a cell to be handed over to an adjacent cell. The performance metrics used to evaluate handover algorithms are handover blocking probability, call blocking probability, handover probability, call dropping probability, rate of handover, probability of an unnecessary handover, duration of interruption, and delay (distance). A handover is performed in three stages. The mobile station (MS) continuously gathers information of the received signal level of the base station (BS) with which it is connected, and of all other BTSs it can detect. This information is then averaged to filter out fast-fading effects. The averaged data is then passed on to the decision algorithm, which decides if it will request a handover to another station. When it decides to do so, handover is executed by both the old BS and the MS, resulting in a connection to the new BS. As stated earlier, the received signal level suffers from fading effects. To prevent handover resulting from temporary fluctuations in the received signal level, the measurements must be averaged. An averaging window whose length determines the number of samples to be averaged is used. Longer averaging lengths give more reliable handover decisions, but also result in longer handover delays. Detailed studies were done to determine the averaging window shapethat is, to determine whether recent measurements should be treated as more

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reliable than older ones. The averaging window is used to trade off between handover rate and handover delay. The time over which a call may be maintained within a cell, without handoff, is called the dwell time. The dwell time of a particular user is governed by a number of factors, including propagation, interference, distance between the subscriber and the base station and other time varying effects. Even when a mobile user is stationary, ambient motion in the vicinity of the base station and the mobile can produce fading; thus even a stationary subscriber may have a random and finite dwell time. Analysis indicates that the statistics of dwell time vary greatly, depending on the speed of the user and the type of radio coverage. For example in mature cell which provide coverage for vehicular highway users, most users tend to have a relatively constant speed and travel along fixed and well-defined paths with good radio coverage. In such instances, the dwell time for an arbitrary user is a random variable with a distribution that is highly concentrated about the mean dwell time. On the other hand, for users in dense, cluttered, microcell environments, there is typically a large variation of dwell time about the mean and dwell times are typically shorter than the cell geometry would otherwise suggest. It is apparent that statistics of dwell time is important in the practical design of handoff algorithms. In first generation analog cellular system, signal strength measurement are made by base station and supervised by MSC. Each base station constantly monitors the signal strengths of all of its reverse voice channels to determine the relative location of each mobile user with respect to base station tower. In addition to measuring the RSSI of calls in progress within a cell, a spare receiver in each base station, called the locator receiver, is used to scan and determine signal strengths of mobile users which are in neighboring cells. The locator receiver is controlled by the MSC and is used to monitor the signal strength of users in neighboring cells which appear to be in need of handoff and reports all RSSI values to the MSC. Based on the locator receiver signal strength information from each base station, the MSC decides if a handoff is necessary or not. In todays second generation system, handoff decisions are mobile assisted. In mobile assisted handover (MAHO), every mobile station measures the received power from the surrounding base stations and continually reports the result of these measurements to the serving base station. A handoff is initiated when the power received from the base station of a neighboring cell begins to exceed the power received from the current base station by a certain level or for a certain period of time. The MAHO method enables the call to be handed over between the base stations at much faster rate than in first generation analog systems since the handoff measurements are made by each mobile and the MSC no longer constantly monitors signal strength. MAHO is practically suited for microcell environments where handoffs are more frequent. During a course of a call, if a mobile moves from one cellular system to a different cellular system controlled by different MSC, an intersystem handoff becomes necessary. An MSC engages in an intersystem handoff when a mobile signal becomes weak in a given cell and the MSC cannot find another cell within its system to which it can transfer the call in

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progress. There are many issues that must be addressed when implanting an intersystem handoff. For instance, a local call may become a long distance call as the mobile moves out of its home system and becomes a roamer in a neighboring system. Also compatibility between the two MSCs must be determined before implementing an intersystem handoff. Different systems have different policies and methods for managing handoff requests. Some systems handle handoff requests in the same way they handle originating calls. In such systems, the probability that a handoff request will not be served by a base station is equal to the blocking probability of incoming calls. However from users point of view, having a call abruptly terminated while in the middle of a conversation is more annoying than being blocked occasionally on a new call attempt. To improve the quality of service as perceived by the users, various methods have been devised to prioritize handoff requests over call initiation requests when allocating voice channels.

2.6-1 Decision Algorithm for Handover Timing

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2.6-2 Umbrella Cell Approach

In practical cellular system, several problems arise when attempting to design for a wide range of mobile velocities. High speed vehicles pass through the coverage region of a cell within a matter of seconds, whereas pedestrian users may never need a handoff during a call. Particularly with the addition of microcells to provide capacity, the MSC can quickly become burdened if high speed users are constantly being passed between very small cells. Several schemes have been devised to handle the simultaneous traffic of high speed and low speed users while minimizing the handoff intervention from the MSC. Another practical limitation is the ability to obtain new cell sites. Although the cellular concept clearly provides additional capacity through the addition of cell sites, in practice it is difficult for cellular service providers to obtain new physical cell site locations in urban areas. Zoning laws, ordinances, and other non technical barriers often make it more attractive for a cellular provider to install additional channels and base stations at the same physical location of an existing cell, rather than find new site locations. By using different antenna heights (often on the same building or tower) and different power levels, it is possible to provide large and small cells which are co-located at a single location. This technique is called the umbrella cell approach and is used to provide large area coverage to high speed users while providing small area coverage to users travelling at low speeds. The umbrella cell approach ensures that the number of handoffs is minimized for high speed users and provides additional microcell channels for pedestrian users. The speed of each user may be estimated by the base station or MSC by evaluating how rapidly the short-term average signal strength on the RVC changes over time, or more sophisticated algorithms may be used to evaluate and partition users. If a high speed user in the large umbrella cell is approaching the base station and its velocity is rapidly decreasing, the base station may decide to hand the user into the co-located microcell without MSC intervention.

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2.6-3 Cell Dragging

Another practical handoff problem in microcell systems is known as cell dragging. Cell dragging results from pedestrian users that provide a very strong signal to the base station. Such a situation occurs in an urban environment when there is a line of sight radio path between the subscriber and the base station. As the user travels away from the base station at a very slow speed, the average signal strength does not decay rapidly. Even when the user has travelled well beyond the designed range of the cell, the received signal at the base station may be above the handoff threshold, thus a handoff may not be made. This creates a potential interference and traffic management problem since the user has meanwhile travelled deep within a neighboring cell. To solve the cell dragging problem, handoffs threshold and radio coverage parameters must be adjusted carefully.

2.7 IMPROVING CAPACITY & COVERAGE IN CELLULAR SYSTEM

As the demand for wireless service increases the number of channels assigned to a cell eventually becomes insufficient to support the required number of users. At this point cellular design techniques are needed to provide more channels per unit coverage area. Three popular techniques are discussed below.

2.7-1 Cell Splitting

Unfortunately, economic considerations made the concept of creating full systems with many small areas impractical. To overcome this difficulty, system operators developed the idea of cell splitting. As a service area becomes full of users, this approach is used to split a single area into smaller ones. In this way, urban centers can be split into as many areas as necessary to provide acceptable service levels in heavy-traffic regions, while larger, less expensive cells can be used to cover remote rural regions as shown in figure-2.6

Figure-2.6

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This technique is used to increase the number of cell. When a cell becomes congested it divides the cell into smaller cell. By this way the subdivided cell has its own base station known as BTS. Also the antenna size becomes small and low Figure-2.7 transmitted power is reduced. Cell spitting increases the capacity of cellular system and the number of time that channels are reused. By this way the cell has smaller radius and the new smaller cell called the micro cell should be installed between the existing cells. So the number of capacity increases due to the additional number of channel per unit area. The given figure-2.6 shows the spitted cell and the large cell. In this figure every cell were reduced in such a way that the every cell is cut in half, in order to cover the entire service area with smaller cell approximately four time as many cell is required. Considering a circle with can show this a radius R. The area covered by such a circle is four times as large as the area covered by the circle with radius R/2. The increase number of cell will increase the number of cluster over the coverage area, which would increase the number of channel and thus the capacity in the coverage area increases. Cell splitting allows a system to grow by replacing large cell with smaller, while not upsetting the channel allocation scheme required maintaining the minimum number of co-channel reuse ratio. An example of cell splitting is shown in figure-1.7. The base station are placed at the corner of the cell, and the area served by the base station A is assumed to be saturated traffic i, e blocking of base station A exceeds acceptable rates. New base stations are therefore needed in the region to increase the number of channel in the area and to reduce the area served by the single base station. From the figure B comes to know that the original bas station has been surrounded by the six new micro-cells. In the figure the smaller cell were added in such away Figure-1.8 as to preserve the frequency reused plan of the system. For example the microcell base station labeled G was placed half way between two larger stations utilizing the same channel set G. For the new cell to be smaller in size, the transmit power of the cell must be reduced. The transmit power of the new cell with radius half that of the original cell can be found by examining the received power Pat new and old cell boundaries and setting them equal to each other. This is necessary to ensure that the frequency reuse plan for the new microcells behaves exactly as the original cell. In example the smaller cell were added in such a way that to preserve the frequency reuse plan of the system, for example the micro cell base station labelled G was placed half way between two larger base stations utilizing the same channel set G. This is also case for the other micro

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cells in the figure. As can be seen from the figure-1.8, cell splitting merely scales the geometry of the cluster. In this case the radius of each micro cell is half that of the original cell.

2.7-2 Cell Sectoring

Cell splitting achieves capacity improvement by essentially rescaling the system. By decreasing the cell radius R and keeping the co-channel reuse ratio D/R unchanged, cell splitting increases the number of channel per unit area. Another method to increase the capacity is to keep the cell radius unchanged seek methods to decrease the D/R ratio. Sectoring increase s the SIR so that the cluster size may be reduced. In this approach, first the SIR is improved using the directional antennas, then capacity improvement is achieved by reducing the number of cells in the cluster, thus increasing the frequency reuse. However to do this successfully, it is necessary to reduce the relative interference without decreasing the transmit power. The co-channel of interface in a cellular system may be decrease by replacing a single omni-directional antennas at the base station by several directional antennas, each traditional within a specific sector. By using directional antennas, a given cell will receive interference and transmit within only a fraction of the available co-direction cells. The technique for with the co-channel interference is reduced depends on the amount of sectoring used.
Figure 2.8

A cell is normally partitioned into 120 degree sector or six 60 degree sectors as shown in the figure-2.8 When sectoring is employed, the channels used in a particular cell are broken down into sectored groups and are used only within particular sector. Assuming seven-cell reuse, for the case of 120 degrees sectors, the number of interferers in the first tier is reduced from six to two. This is because only two of the six co-channel cells receive interference with a particular sectored channel group. The resulting S/I is a significant improvement over the omni-directional case, where the worst case S/I was proved to be 17 dB. This S/I improvement allows the wireless engineer to then decrease the cluster size N in order to improve the frequency reuse, and thus the system capacity. In practical system further
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improvement in S/I is achieved by down tilting the sector antennas such that the radiation pattern in the vertical plane has a notch at the nearest co-channel cell distance. The improvement in S/I implies that with 120 degrees sectoring, the minimum required S/I Of 18 dB can be easily achieved with seven-cell reuse as compared to 12-cell reuse for the worst possible situation in the unsectored case. Thus sectoring reduces interference, which amounts to an increase in capacity by a factor of 12/7 or 1.714. In practice, the reduction in interference offered by sectoring enable planners to reduce the cluster size N and provides an additional degree of freedom in assigning channels. The penalty for improved S/I and the resulting capacity improvement from the shrinking cluster size is an increased number of antennas at the base station and a decrease in trunking efficiency due to channel sectoring at the base station. 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 small pools and decreases trunking efficiency. Since sectoring reduces the coverage area of a particular group of channels, the number of handoffs increases as well. Fortunately many modern base stations support sectorization and allow mobiles to be handed off from sector to sector within the same cell without intervention from MSC, so the handoff problem is often not a major concern.

2.7-2-i Using Sectored Sites

The distribution of RF carriers, and the size of the cells, is selected to achieve a balance between avoiding co-channel interference by geographically separating cells using the same RF frequencies, and achieving a channel density sufficient to satisfy the anticipated demand. By sectoring a site we can fit more cells into the same geographical area, thus increasing the number of MS subscribers who can gain access and use the cellular network. This sectorization of sites typically occurs in densely populated areas, or where a high demand of MSs is anticipated, such as conference centers /business premises.

2.7-2-ii 4 Site/3 Cell

A typical re-use pattern used in GSM planning is the 4 site/3 cell. For example, the network provider has 36 frequencies available, and wishes to use the 4 site/3 cell re-use pattern he may split the frequencies up as follows: Cell A1 1 13 25 Cell B1 2 14 26 Cell C1 3 15 27 Cell D1 4 16 28 Cell A2 5 17 29 Cell B2 6 18 30 Cell C2 7 19 31 Cell D2 8 20 32 Cell A3 9 21 33 Cell B3 10 22 34 Cell C3 11 23 35 Cell D3 12 24 36

In this configuration each cell has a total of 3 carriers and each site has a total of 9 carriers. If the provider wished to reconfigure to a 3 site/3 cell then the result would be:

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Cell A1 1 10 19 28

Cell B1 2 11 20 29

Cell C1 3 12 21 30

Cell A2 4 13 22 31

Cell B2 5 14 23 32

Cell C2 6 15 24 33

Cell A3 7 16 25 34

Cell B3 8 17 26 35

Cell C3 9 18 27 36

As can be seen from the table, each cell now has 4 carriers and each site has 12 carriers. This has the benefit of supporting more subscribers in the same geographic region, but problems could arise with co-channel and adjacent channel interference.

Figure-2.9

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2.7-3 Micro Cell Zone Concept

When the load on the switching and control link of the mobile system increases, the number of Handoff will be required for the sectoring. The solution for this problem was presented by Lee. This concept is based on a micro cell concept for seven cell reuse. In this scheme each of the three zone sites represented by Tx and Rx in the figure. As the mobile travels from one zone to zone to other zone within the cell, it retains the same channel. Thus unlike in sectoring, a handoff is not required at the MSC when the mobile travels between zones within the cell. The base station simply switches the channel to a different zone site. In this way a given channel active only in the particular zone in which the mobile is traveling and hence the base station radiation is localized and interference is reduced. The advantage of the zone cell technique is that while 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 transmitter on the edges of the of the cell. Decrease co-channel interference improves the signal quality and also leads to an increase in capacity without the degradation in trucking efficiency caused by the sectoring

Figure-2.10

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