Impact of Angular Spread on Higher Order Sectorization in WCDMA Systems

This paper analyzes higher order sectorization (HOS) in WCDMA. Sectorization is achieved by splitting the sites into smaller sectors using highly directional antennas. The impact of angular spread on the system throughput is evaluated using a dynamic radio network simulator. Increasing the number of sectors per site from 3 to 6 and 12 in a typical urban radio channel yields a downlink system capacity gain of 80% and 200% respectively. Simulations have shown that the increase in the ratio of users in soft and softer handover per sector is negligible and the impact of angular spread on the system performance of a 6 and 12 sector sites is minor and negligible for the 3 sector sites