Swadhin Mishra Dept.

of ECE

Lecture 1
• Cellular systems provide two way voice and data communication with regional,
national, or international coverage.
• Cellular systems were initially designed for mobile terminals inside vehicles with
antennas mounted on the vehicle roof.
• The coverage area of a cellular system is divided into non-overlapping cells, where
some set of channels is assigned to each cell. Operation within a cell is controlled
by a centralized base station (BS).
• Initial cellular system designs were mainly driven by the high cost of base stations.
For this reason, early cellular systems used a relatively small number of cells to
cover an entire city or region. The cell base stations were placed on tall buildings
or mountains and transmitted at very high power with cell coverage areas of several
square miles. These large cells are called macrocells.
• Signal power radiated uniformly in all directions(omni-directional antenna), so a
mobile moving in a circle around the base station would have approximately constant
received power unless the signal were blocked by an attenuating object.

Figure 1: Cellular system

• With large cells the problem with the initial system was the limited number of
subscribers (users).
• As the number of subscriber increases the later cellular system use smaller cells.
The smaller cells are called as microcells and picocells. This revolution to smaller
cells occurred for two reasons:
1. the need for higher capacity in areas with high user density
2. the reduced size and cost of base station electronics
• A cell of any size can support roughly the same number of users. Thus, for a given
coverage area, a system with many microcells has a higher number of users per unit
area than a system with just a few macrocells. In addition, less power is required
at the mobile terminals in microcellualr systems, since the terminals are closer to
the base stations. However, the evolution to smaller cells has complicated network
design.

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• The operation of current cellular network is presented in the following figure [Fig.2]

Figure 2: Current cellular network architecture

• All base stations in a given geographical area are connected via a high-speed com-
munication link to a mobile telephone switching office (MTSO). This is also known
as Master Station Controller (MSC).

• The MTSO acts as a central controller for the network. Some of the functions
carried out by MTSO are

1. allocating channels within each cell

2. routing calls to and from mobile users
3. coordinating handoffs between cells when a mobile traverses a cell boundary

• All the long distance calls originated by mobile phones are forwarded by MTSO to
the public telephone network (PSTN).

• The connection to internet for data communication is also processed by MSC only.

1. Shape of Cell

• Coverage area of an omni-directional antennas are generally looks like a circle.

Hence if omni-directional antennas are used at the center of a cell, then the
cell shape must be circular.

Figure 3: Current cellular network architecture

• But if circular cells are used to provide coverage then some area will remain
uncovered (i.e. no coverage).

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• To overcome this problem circular cells can be closely packed as shown in the
figure. But this will give rise to overlapping of cells.
• Hence circular cells are not used theoretically.
• So cell can be of any regular shape which can be grouped to cover the entire
coverage area without any overlapping.
• The possible regular geometrical shape that can be used as cells are
(a) triangle
(b) square
(c) rectangle
(d) hexagon
(e) diamond
• The following figure confirms that the above mentioned shapes can be used to
provide coverage to the entire area without any overlapping.

Figure 4: Cells of various shapes

• Theoretically hexagon shape for the cells are considered in normal cellular
system because
(a) The hexagonal cell shape has a larger area than other regular structures,
thus less cells can be used to cover a certain geographical region.
(b) hexagonal cell shape closely approximates the circular radiation pattern for
Omni-directional antennas, i.e. energy wastage outside the cell is minimum
in a hexagonal cell for omnidirectional antennas.

Figure 5: Why Hexagonal cell?

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2. Size of Cell

• To find out the size of a cell, it is assumed that an omnidirectional antenna is

placed at the center of the cell.
• The received power at various places in all directions are measured.
• Assuming that there is no obstructions between the transmitter (BS) and re-
ceiver the contour of points receiving same power from the BS is a circle.
• So the cell radius is the radius of one such contour where the received power
is −100 dBm.

Figure 6: Cell radius

3. Hexagonal Cells

• For hexagonal cells,the BS is placed at its center [There are other ways of
placing the BS inside a cell and will be discussed later ].
• The radius (R) is the distance between the BS (center) and the farthest point
from it,i.e. distance between the center of the hexagon and any of the vertices.
√
3 3 2
• The area of a regular hexagon [mostly assumed ] is taken as Ac = 2
R .

Figure 7: Cell radius

• The distance between two adjacent cells is the distance between the centres of
two cells. In√hexagonal cellular system the distance between two adjacent cells
is given as 3R.

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Cellular Communication
In cellular communication there is one base station
(MS) in every cell. A certain group of channels
(duplex) are allocated to each base station. Each
user/subscriber/mobile station (MS) inside the cell gets
a pair of channel (a duplex channel) to communi-
cate. Different channels are allocated to MSs in the
cell. The channel from BS to MS is called as for-
ward/downlink channel and the channel from the mo-
bile (MS) to BS is called as reverse/ uplink chan-
nel.

As explained earlier by using smaller cell the number of

subscriber in the system (known as System Capacity) increases. Another technique which
can be used to increase the capacity or increase the spectral efficiency (?) is the frequency
reuse.

Frequency Reuse
Each cellular BS is allocated a group of radio channels to be used within a cell. BS in
adjacent cells are assigned with different group of channels. Because if adjacent cells use
the same set of channels then users in each of cell will experience the interference. The
same groups of channels may be assigned to different cells that are separated from one
another by distances large enough to keep the interference levels within tolerable limits.
The design process of selecting and allocating channel groups for all of the cells (BSs) is
called frequency reuse or frequency planning.
• Divide the large cell into groups of smaller cells.
• Divide the available channels into groups.
• Assign different groups of channels to each of the smaller cell (adjacent).

Figure 8: Frequency Reuse

• The group of cells to which the total channels are distributed (equally) is called
cluster of cells.
• To increase the system capacity, replicate the cluster many times within the coverage
area.

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• As seen in (a) of Fig[ 8], the total available frequency in the system is equally
divided into three groups (F 1, F 2, F 3) and allocated to three adjacent cell. Hence
these three cells form cluster. The cluster size presented by N . So in (a), N = 3.

• Similarly in (b) the cluster size N = 4 and in (c) the cluster size N = 7.

Can any value of N be used in cellular systems? ANS: NO

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