The Cellular Concept

Presentation Credits
The material for these slides has been taken from T. S. Rappaports Book: Wireless Communications, Principles and Practice (2nd Edition). I would like to thank the author and publishers for making the figures for this book easily accessible online. Content for some slides and snapshots of figures have been taken from video lectures on Wireless Communications by Dr Ranjan Bose,Dept of Electrical Engineering,IIT,Dehli

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Learning Objectives
We know that
Cell capacity and Reuse
N and C

Improving Capacity & Coverage in Cellular Systems Power Control to reduce interference Cell Splitting Sectoring Microcell Zone Concept Repeaters for Range Extension

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Power Control to Reduce Interference

In practical systems, power level of every subscriber is under constant control by the serving BS Power control not only reduces interference levels but also prolongs battery life In CDMA spread spectrum systems, power control is a key feature to ensure maximal utilization of system capacity Reduced Interference leads to high capacity

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Improving Capacity
As demand for service increases, system designers have to provide more channel per unit coverage area Common Techniques are: Cell Splitting, Sectoring and Microcell Zoning Cell Splitting increases the number of BS deployed and allows an orderly growth of the cellular system Sectoring uses directional antennas to further control interference Micro cell Zoning distributes the coverage of cell and extends the cell boundary to hard-to-reach areas
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Cell Splitting
Cell splitting is the process of subdividing a congested cell into smaller cells with their own BS a corresponding reduction in antenna height a corresponding reduction in transmit power Splitting the cell reduces the cell size and thus more number of cells have to be used For the new cells to be smaller in size the transmit power of these cells must be reduced. More number of cells more number of clusters more channels high capacity
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Cell Splitting

Cells are split to add channels with no new spectrum usage

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Cell Splitting-Power Issues

Suppose the cell radius of new cells is reduced by half What is the required transmit power for these new cells??

Pr[at old cell boundary]=Pt1R-n Pr[at new cell boundary]= Pt2(R/2)-n where Pt1 and Pt2 are the transmit powers of the larger and smaller cell base stations respectively, and n is the path loss exponent. So, Pt2 = Pt1/2n

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Cell Splitting
Pt2 = Pt1/2n

If we take n=3 and the received powers equal to each other, then
P =P /8 t2 t1

In other words, the transmit power must be reduced by 9dB in order to fill in the original coverage area while maintaining the S/I requirement

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Cell Splitting

In practice not all the cells are split at the same time. This means that different size cells will exist simultaneously.
In such situations, 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.
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Cell Splitting

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Cell Splitting

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Cell Splitting

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Cell Splitting
When there are two cell sizes in the same region, one cannot use original transmit power for all new cells or the new transmit power for all original cells Larger transmit power for all->some channels used by smaller cells would not be sufficiently separated from co-channel cells

Smaller transmit power for all->some parts of larger cells left un-served Channels in the old cell must be broken down into two channel groups, one for smaller cell and other for larger cell The larger cell is usually dedicated to high speed traffic so that handoffs occur less frequently
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Practical Handoff Considerations

Umbrella Cell Approach
Mobile Assisted Handover. Advantage is reduced load on MSC.

What is the Guard channel concept?

Reservation of a fraction of available channels exclusively for handoff requests from ongoing calls.

Cell Splitting
Two channel group sizes depend on the stage of splitting process At the beginning of splitting process, there will be fewer channels in small power groups With increasing demand,smaller groups will require more group Splitting continues until all channels in area are used in lower power group Entire system by that time is rescaled to have smaller radius per cell
Antenna down tilting is used to focus energy from BS toward ground, to limit radio coverage of newly formed microcells

Cell Splitting

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Cell Splitting
Suppose original congested area is originally covered by 5 cells Each with 80 channels Capacity=5x80=400 users After cell splitting,R new =R/2 We now have 24 cells New capacity=24x80=19200 users For n=4,Transmit Power of New BS is 12 dB lower than original

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Sectoring
As opposed to cell splitting, where D/R is kept constant while decreasing R,sectoring keeps R untouched and reduces the D/R Capacity improvement is achieved by reducing the number of cells per cluster, thus increasing frequency reuse In this approach first SIR is improved using directional antennas, the capacity improvement is achieved by reducing the number of cells in a cluster this increasing frequency reuse
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Sectoring
The CCI may be decreased by replacing the single omnidirectional antenna by several directional antennas, each radiating within a specified sector

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Sectoring

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Sectoring
A directional antenna transmits to and receives from only a fraction of total of the co-channel cells. Thus CCI is reduced

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Problems with Sectoring

Increases the number of antennas at each BS Decrease in trunking efficiency due to sectoring(dividing the bigger pool of channels into smaller groups) Increase number of handoffs(sector-to sector) Good news:Many modern BS support sectoring and related handoff without help of MSC

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The Micro Zone Cell Concept

Microcell Zone Concept

The Problems of sectoring can be addressed by Microcell Zone Concept A cell is conceptually divided into microcells or zones Each microcell(zone) is connected to the same base station(fiber/microwave link) Doing something in middle of cell splitting and sectoring by extracting good points of both Each zone uses a directional antenna Each zone radiates power into the cell. MS is served by strongest zone As mobile travels from one zone to another, it retains the same channel,i.e no hand off The BS simply switches the channel to the next zone site
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The Zone Cell Concept

Microcell Zone Concept

Advantages: Reduced Interference (Zone radius is small and directional antennas are used). No loss in trunking efficiency (all channels are used by all cells). No extra handoffs. Increase in capacity (since smaller cluster size can be used).

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Microcell Zone Concept

Illustration of extent of Capacity Increase by an example

Suppose the desired S/I=18 dB with path loss exponent of n=4 For a system of N=7,a D/R of 4.6 was shown to achieve this How much capacity increase can occur if we use Microcell Zoning of 3 zones/cell???
In zone microcell system, transmission at any instant is confined to one zone Therefore,D z/R z=4.6 Each hexagon represents a zone and 3 hexagons represent a cell Zone radius=One hexagon radius Capacity of system related to distance between co-channel cells and not zones.Shown as D

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Microcell Zone Concept Value of co channel reuse is 3 D/R = 3 corresponds to N=3 Reduction in cluster size from N=7 to N=3 Increase in capacity is 7/3=2.33 times

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Repeaters for Range Extension

Useful for hard to reach areas Buildings Tunnels Valleys Radio transmitters called Repeaters can be used to provide coverage in these area Repeaters are bi-directional Rx signals from BS Amplify the signals Reradiate the signals Received noise and interference is also reradiated.

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Assignment#04
Attempt the following Exercise problems at the end of the chapter and submit neat and clean solutions. Problems: 3.7, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.15. Submission Date: Thursday 19 February 2009,At the start of Class

You are advised to attempt the problems yourself and not to submit solutions copied blindly from your friends assignments.