The effects of modulation and urban shielding on microcellular system capacity

This paper evaluates the effects of modulation and urban shielding for modern microcellular systems. The capacity analysis makes use of the site specific ray-tracing propagation models previously developed at the University of Bristol. For a given microcellular location a site specific building database has been used to predict the signal coverage as a result of reflection, diffraction and scattering in the focal environment. Taking into account a number of system parameters, such as modulation type, antenna pattern, SNR, C/I, and outage probability, the ray-traced propagation data has been extensively analysed to provide an accurate estimation of system capacity. Using this model the impact of higher level modulation schemes such as 16-QAM are examined for microcellular networks