Capacity of next generation unified radio access systems supporting multi-class services

In this paper, we analyze and compare the Erlang capacity of next generation unified radio access systems supporting several different radio access technologies according to two different operation methods: separate and common operation methods, by simultaneously considering the link capacity limit per sector as well as channel element (CE) limit in BS. Through a numerical example, it is shown that we can get up to 88% Erlang capacity improvement through the common operation method when there is no CE limit in BS. Even with the worst-case assignment scheme, we can still get about 34% capacity improvement over the separate operation method. However, the limited number of CEs in BS reduces the capacity gains of unified radio access systems with common operation over separate operation. In order to fully extract the Erlang capacity of unified radio access system, an efficient method is needed to select the proper number of CEs in base station while minimizing the equipment cost.