Assessment of Network Layouts for CDMA Radio Access

The aim of this paper is to perform an overall comparison of different network layouts for CDMA-based cellular radio access. Cellular network layout, including base station site locations and theoretical azimuth directions of antennas, can be defined by tessellations in order to achieve a continuous coverage of the radio network. Different tessellation types—triangle, square, and hexagon—result in different carrier-to-interference scenarios, and thus will provide nonequal system-level performance. This performance of a cellular network is strongly related to configuration parameters as base station antenna height, beamwidth, and sectoring. In this paper, a theoretical model is defined for the assessment, which includes numerical analysis and system-level simulations. A numerical analysis was performed first, and then system-level Monte-Carlo simulations were conducted to verify and to extend numerical results. The obtained results of the numerical analysis indicate that a hexagonal "clover-leaf" layout is superior, but the results of system-level simulation give similar performance for the triangular and square layouts. These results indicate also the importance of the antenna height optimization for all layouts. Moreover, the simulation results also pointed out that 6-sector configuration is superior both in coverage and in capacity compared to nominal 3-sector configuration that is typically preferred in coverage-related network deployments in practice.