On the capacity and spatial fairness trade-off in planning sectorization and frequency reuse

The intrinsic trade-off between the capacity and Quality of Service (QoS) has long been subject of investigation in the design of MAC layer scheduling, power and call admission control mechanisms. However, from prospective of planning a cellular network, while capacity and coverage trade-off has been well studied and capacity and energy trade-off has also received significant attention recently, trade-off between the capacity and spatial fairness of service level in the coverage area is relatively overlooked. In this paper we identify the increasing importance of this trade-off in context of emerging cellular networks and present a set of metrics that can be used to quantify and analyze this trade-off particularly in terms of number of sectors per site and frequency reuse factor. The numerical results presented also provide insights into the relatively under explored advantages of intra-site frequency reuse compared to classic inter site frequency reuse. The key advantage of these metrics is that they can be used as part of the optimization objectives for planning future cellular networks to meet the increasingly pressing requirements both in capacity and QoS.