Realizing intermediate reuse factors for capacity evaluation

The goal of many cellular system studies is the capacity evaluation and comparison of planned cellular systems. The capacity definition includes multiple quality requirements which must be met, such as a blocking probability for new calls and an outage probability for connected calls. The reuse factor and Erlang loading of each cell are adjusted so that all quality criteria are met. However, some quality criteria are exceeded. This makes capacity comparisons difficult, since systems may be compared with different qualities. One of the problems is that the site reuse factor can only take on a restricted number of values, e.g. 1,3,4,7. This paper proposes a practical method for obtaining intermediate reuse values, so that multiple quality criteria can be more closely met. This is achieved by partitioning the total channel set into two subsets, each subset being allocated with a different reuse factor. Such an approach is physically realizable and straightforward to use in capacity evaluation simulations. Also, the approach can be extended to provide a continuum of reuse values. As an example, this method is applied to evaluate the capacity benefit of receive antenna diversity for the American Digital Cellular (ADC) standard