Traffic capacity of cellular packet CDMA for varying cell size and propagation scenarios

The paper presents a study of the traffic carrying capacity of integrated voice/data cellular packet CDMA networks over a range of alternative cell size and channel propagation scenarios. While CDMA has been shown to offer a significant capacity advantage over narrowband TDMA, the gain is very sensitive to assumed propagation loss and cell size parameters. Accordingly, it is of interest to obtain a more accurate assessment of system efficiency and performance in potential macro, micro and pico cell environments. A discrete event simulation model has been developed for cellular packet CDMA with mixed voice/data traffic, and is used to obtain performance measures such as throughput, voice packet loss rate and data delay as a function of offered load. Using a realistic distance-dependent propagation loss model, it is shown that spatial reuse efficiency of the packet CDMA system varies significantly with cell size, decreasing by as much as a factor of 2 as cell size is reduced from 500 to 50 meters