Bounds and estimates of the uplink capacity of cellular systems

We present bounds and estimates of the uplink spectral efficiency of cellular systems employing various multiple access schemes, in particular TDMA and CDMA in conjunction with FEC coding. We determine the cumulative distribution function of co-channel interference using a Monte Carlo technique and use this in conjunction with Shannon´s (1949) bound on channel capacity to obtain upper bounds. Estimates are also obtained using simulated performance of practical codes. We show that coded TDMA with 100% re-use gives a greater capacity than with cluster size 3, and that CDMA with voice activation has approximately twice the capacity of either. Adaptive TDMA is identified as promising scheme for further capacity improvement