Practical Cellular Performance Bounds via Shotgun Cellular Systems

This paper considers two-dimensional interference-limited cellular radio systems. It introduces the shotgun cellular system that places base stations randomly and assigns channels randomly. Such systems are shown to provide lower bounds to cellular performance that are easy to compute, independent of shadow fading, and apply to a number of design scenarios. Traditional hexagonal systems provide an upper performance bound. The difference between upper and lower bounds is small under operating conditions typical in modern TDMA and CDMA cellular systems. Furthermore, in the strong shadow fading limit the bounds converge. To give insights into the design of practical systems, several variations are explored including mobile access methods, sectorizing, channel assignments, and placement with deviations. Together these results indicate cellular performance is very robust and little is lost in making rapid minimally-planned deployments. 1. This work was completed under NSF CAREER Award NCR-9624791 and NSF Grant NCR-9725778. IEEE JSAC, v. 18, n. 11, Nov. 2000, pp. 2443–2455