Reverse link erlang capacity of multiclass CDMA cellular system considering nonideal antenna sectorization

In this paper, the effect of antenna sectorization in the reverse link Erlang capacity of a multiclass code-division multiple-access (CDMA) cellular system is studied. Traditionally, it has been considered that the capacity is multiplied by a factor equal to the number of sectors introduced. This is true only in the ideal antenna sectored system. However, due to the nonideal antenna radiation pattern, the sectorization gain is smaller than the number of sectors. Our contribution is the analytical study of the effect of nonideal antenna patterns on the capacity of a multiclass CDMA system. We also present an approximated analysis of the Erlang capacity, considering that blocking in CDMA occurs when the interference reaches a predetermined level above the background noise level of mainly thermal origin. The analysis also includes the effects of imperfect power control and service activity detection. We found that the capacity losses due to the consideration of antenna sectorization are about 20.20% for the nonideal antenna radiation pattern and 30.32% for the evaluated commercial radiation pattern. This percentage loss implies that the sectorization gain is approximately 2.39 for a nonideal antenna pattern and 2.09 for a commercial antenna pattern in typical conditions, = 4 and = 8 dB.