Time slotted cellular systems

The paper proposes a system with remarkable bandwidth efficiency: on a single standard channel it can carry 5 simultaneous speakers. It is based on two technological trends of recent years: faster mobile data transmission, and cheaper reasonable quality compressed digital voice. By transmitting segments of speech in high speed bursts, it time division multiplexes a single channel among several mobiles. With several subchannels available, it becomes possible to lay out a cellular system based on reuse of time slots, rather than frequencies. The proposed system is shown to need a cluster size of 9, for a fully deployed hexagonal array. With only two operating frequencies, therefore, such a system can cover an unlimited geographic area with one subchannel per cell. Moreover, for linear arrays, as along a highway, the system can be extended indefinitely with only a single operating frequency.