Optimal Cell Size in Multi-Hop Cellular Networks

3G-based Multi-hop cellular networks (MCNs) inherit a special characteristic of 3G systems, namely the relationship between a cell´s coverage and its capacity. At the planning stage, a cell may be statically set to have small coverage with high capacity, a large coverage with small capacity, or some other fixed settings in between. Such static settings, however, do not adapt to the projected dynamic nature of users in 3G-especially in an MCN environment. In this paper, we propose the Optimal Cell Size (OCS) scheme for a 3G TDD W-CDMA MCN multi-cell environment. Given the cell capacity function, users´ distribution and demands, OCS yields optimal cell sizes that maximize the system throughput through balancing coverage and capacity. Not only can OCS cope with dynamic network conditions, but it can also be considered as an aid to the network planning process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-cell optimal cell size scheme in the context of MCNs.