ENGR 100 Introduction to Engineering Engineering Design Assignment

Problem Statement: Cellular Telephone System

You are a designer for a promising new cellular telephone company, Century Telecom, that has just won a slice of the frequency spectrum in the Cary, NC area. You are going to provide cellular service to the Town of Cary and adjacent suburban areas. Because your company is new, and still rather small, this will be the only area that you serve for now. However, you expect to grow in the near future! A map of your projected service area is shown in Figure 1. The inner line represents the city limits, while the outer line represents the limits of your coverage area. The area of coverage is about 329 square miles. The suburban area is described by drawing a line around the city limits at a distance of about 4.5 miles. You are in charge of designing the telephone system for this application from the ground up, so to speak. Two important things your design must address are: 1) determining the number of cell towers and their placement and 2) how to break up the frequency spectrum that has been allotted to your company and determining which towers use which part of the frequency spectrum.

Determining the number of cell towers needed and where to place them is complicated by zoning laws that the city council has established prohibiting structures over 30 feet inside the city limits. The towers which you will use to support your transmit/receive antennas are much taller than 30 feet. The coverage radius for a typical cell tower is about 5 km. More information about cell tower coverage is discussed in the section additional information for Part I, which you should read before beginning work on part I of this assignment.

The Federal Communications Commission has assigned you a chunk of the frequency spectrum, 33 megahertz. When cellular systems are designed, a decision is made about whether each cell can use the whole allotted spectrum (e.g. the 33 MHz in this case). There are engineering tradeoffs involved. The more of the spectrum you use in each cell, the more customers you can serve. However, if two cells next to each other use the same frequencies, interference in conversations can occur. (Consider, for example, two people having a face-to-face conversation standing next to two other people engaged in the same activity. They are using the same part of the frequency spectrumthe audible partand interference may occur because they can hear each other talking. The situation is much better if, say, they are standing on opposite sides of the
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ENGR 100 Introduction to Engineering Engineering Design Assignment

room.) For this reason, the spectrum is usually broken up into chunks, and rules established about how far two cells must be apart in order to use the same frequency chunks. You must decide how to partition the spectrum among your cells and how frequently to reuse frequencies. The more you reuse frequencies, the more customers you can serve (increasing your potential revenue), but the greater the interference you incur (translating to worse service and possibly loss of customers). Additional information about spectrum chunking and reuse is given in the section additional information for Part II, which you should read before starting Part II.

Figure 1. Projected service area for Cary NC.

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ENGR 100 Introduction to Engineering Engineering Design Assignment

Cellular Telephone Design Assignment Part I Design a cellular coverage map, with antennae placement, for the service area shown in figure 1. A separate Visio document is available on Blackboard that includes the service area and hexagonal coverage cells, both to scale. You can use this document to develop your coverage solution. The radius of a typical cell is about 5 km. Start by finding out the minimum number of cells to cover the area and then see how close you can get to that minimum by building an actual model. Keep in mind you will need figure out how you will serve the downtown area (which, by the way, will have the most customers requiring service). Cellular Telephone Design Assignment Part II Now that you have the geometry of your problem figured out, you need to complete the design of the system by assigning radio frequencies to the antennas in each cell. Recall that the Federal Communications Commission has assigned you a chunk of the frequency spectrum, 33 megahertz. Your design will need to determine the frequency reuse factor (how to partition the 33 MHz of the spectrum allotted to your company), and which cells will reuse the same frequencies (indicate this on the cell assignment map you created in Part I). Report Preparation and Submission You will prepare a document, using MS Word, detailing your solution. Instructions regarding the report format are provided in another document on Blackboard. Your solution should include the minimal number of cells (include calculations) needed to cover the service area, the number of cells you used to cover the service area, and a figure showing your placement of coverage cells with towers. For Part II you must include a figure showing the service coverage cells and which group of frequencies that cell will use. The discussion should include formulas used and a table showing the expected worst case signal-to-noise ratio and the system capacity for all frequency reuse factors (N) you considered in developing your solution. Finally, discuss other factors that might affect the placement of cell towers and how this might impact the solution.

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ENGR 100 Introduction to Engineering Engineering Design Assignment

Additional Information for Part I Cellular telephony is so named because a desired coverage area is divided up into cells which are usually served by a central transmit/receive antenna. A map of the area that the system will serve is analyzed to locate where broadcast antennas should be placed. These antennas can broadcast to only a limited area with sufficient power to be reliable. In real life the cells (i.e. the area it is assumed that the antenna can broadcast to) are usually amorphous in shape, but for analysis we usually assume regularly shaped, uniformly sized cells. The shape used is that of a hexagon. A circle more accurately models the broadcast area of an omni-directional antenna, but non-overlapping circles cannot be placed in such a way as to completely cover a given area. So, in the initial design phase for a cellular system, non-overlapping hexagons are used to cover the entire service area. Although in the previous paragraph we talked about a central antenna, there are other ways to broadcast to a cell. So another design decision that must be made at this point is how to illuminate the cell, or what type of antenna placement to use. Two techniques are center illumination and side illumination. In the center illumination case, one omni-directional antenna structure is placed in the center of each cell. The power levels are set so that signals sent from the antenna cover only the cell to which it is assigned. (Of course this is impossible, but we assume it to be the case and then compensate for error later.) In a side illuminated cell, three directional antenna structures are placed at three equally spaced vertices of the hexagonal cell. Each antenna is designed to broadcast over a wedge, and the three structures together cover the hexagonal cell. Each type of cell is shown in figure 2.

Figure 2. Side and Center illuminated cellular coverage cells.

The side illumination case allows for an overall reduction in antenna sites (including towers and land usage), because a tower can hold three antennas broadcasting into three adjacent cells, but requires more actual antennas. And of course each tower costs money, each antenna costs money and each piece of land on which an antenna is placed costs money.

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ENGR 100 Introduction to Engineering Engineering Design Assignment

VISIO HINTS: Download the Visio file, then open it; this will make sure you have a local copy You can cut and paste objects using right click or crtl-c and crtl-v. You can rotate objects. Create a new page and work in that page. You can copy an entire page using crtl-a for select all and then crtl-v on the new page to paste in the service area map as well as coverage cells. If you select an object you can move it with the arrow keys If you hold down the crtl key while clicking on objects you can select multiple objects Use view zoom to enlarge the drawing You cut and paste from Visio to MS Word, or you can save as a jpeg.

Additional Background for Part II Each cellular call involves at least two antennas, one at the base station (i.e. on the towers that you just placed) and one on the mobile (i.e. the telephone handset or car). They cannot use the same frequency for the same reason that you cannot easily understand someone speaking to you when you are actively talking to them. (The human voice occupies the frequencies from about 40 Hertz to about 3100 Hertz.) Indeed, both parts of the conversation have to be broadcast at frequencies much higher than those of baseband voice--for some reasons which are obvious and some that are not so obvious. So, the uplink (mobile to tower) and downlink (tower to mobile) are assigned to different frequency bands. This is done for every customer served in the cell. A single channel requires 25 kilohertz (times two for uplink and downlink, which makes a duplex channel). (Notice that this is more than 3100-40=3060 Hz, which is what you would expect voice to require. Some coding, which adds information to improve the quality of service, is obviously going on.) Furthermore, cells which sit next to each other in your geometry cannot use the same sets of frequencies, because mobiles on the edge of the coverage area would not be able to distinguish their call from a call in the next cell. A rule must be established as to how far away one cell must be from another cell which uses the same frequencies to serve its customers. This is called frequency reuse assignment. How you define your frequency reuse will determine the quality of service your customers will experience and how many customers you will be able to servea typical design tradeoff!

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ENGR 100 Introduction to Engineering Engineering Design Assignment

Cells are grouped together in N size groups. The entire allocated spectrum is then available to each group. This is called N cell reuse. Any value of N is possible that can be derived from this equation: (1) , For example, take 1 and 1, then 3. For 1 and 2, 7. For 2, 2, 12. For 1, 3, 13. Once you have N chosen, you then divide your total allotted frequencies into N groups. The groups of frequencies are then assigned to cells. Assignments are done in such a way as to maximize the distance between cells using the same group of frequencies. For our hexagonal geometry, it is done like this: from a cell which uses one set of frequencies, to get to the next cell which uses the same set, go out one wall of the cell and move i cells. Then make a 60 turn counter-clockwise and move j cells. A reuse pattern for N=3 is shown in figure 3. N=3 implies three different frequency chunks, so we call them A, B, and C. Cells labeled with the same letter use the same set of frequencies.

Figure 3. Reuse pattern for N=3. The value of N chosen translates directly to the number of customers able to be served (system capacity, C).

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ENGR 100 Introduction to Engineering Engineering Design Assignment

M is the number of clusters of cells in a system and k is the number of duplex channels available per cell (think of this as the cell capacity). Note that M and k must be integers. For the example shown in Figure 3, N=3 and M=4. To find k, you will need to determine the portion of frequency spectrum available for each cell, then divide by the spectrum needed per call. The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that we should chose N=1 and reuse the entire allotted frequency for each cell. But we already know why not to do that: the tradeoff is greater interference between conversations in other cells. This is called co-channel interference. A measure of how much interference affects a conversation is the signal to noise ratio (SNR) experienced. (You already understand signal to noise ratio in the context of writing on a chalk board. Writing on a clean boardlarge signal, small noiseis easier to read than writing on a dirty boardsame signal, greater noise.) The SNR is obtained by dividing the desired signal power by power for all interfering signals. An acceptable signal to noise ratio is a minimum of 15 dB1. If we consider only the first layer of co-channel cells, the signal to noise ratio experienced by a user in a cell is given by:

(2) 3

Where n is between 2 and 4 and represents the severity of the signal environment (are there a lot of highly reflective objects around like buildings or absorbing objects like trees, etc.?) We will assume n=3 for this problem. To choose your value of N, create a spreadsheet with columns for N, S/I (in dB), and system capacity, C. Choose N to maximize capacity while staying within the signal to noise ratio requirements. After you choose N, go back to your map from Part I and label each cell that uses the same frequencies with a letter like the example for N=3 above. Because your map deals with a real-life situation, you might not have the same number of As, Bs, Cs, etc.

1The decibel is a logarithmic unit which is derived by taking ten times the base 10 logarithm of a ratio of powers. So, in this case, the signal to noise ratio in dB would be calculated by taking 10 log(S/I).

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