Fluid Model of the Outage Probability in Sectored Wireless Networks

We establish a closed form formula of the other-cell interference factor f for omni-directional and sectored cellular networks, as a function of the location of the mobile. That formula is based on a fluid model of cellular networks: The key idea is to consider the discrete base stations (BS) entities as a continuum of transmitters which are spatially distributed in the network. Simulations show that the obtained closed-form formula is a very good approximation, even for the traditional hexagonal network. From f, we are able to derive the global outage probability and the spatial outage probability, which depends on the location of a mobile station (MS) initiating a new call. Although initially focused on CDMA (UMTS, HSDPA) and OFDMA (WiMax) networks, we show this approach is applicable to any kind of wireless system such as TDMA (GSM) or even ad-hoc ones.