Dynamic frequency hopping for limited-bandwidth cellular systems

In this paper we evaluate the performance of dynamic frequency hopping (DFH) applied to cellular systems with a limited total bandwidth. The evaluation is done by system-level simulations of a system with 12 carriers and 1/1 frequency reuse, based on the EDGE-Compact system (EDGE-enhanced data rates in existing digital cellular systems). Voice-only circuit-switched operation is assumed. Fading channel, multi-cell interference, voice activity and antenna sectorization are modeled. We present the performance of dynamic frequency hopping compared to random frequency hopping and fixed channel assignment by showing distributions of word error rates. Sensitivity to occupancy, Rayleigh fading assumptions, number of carriers, voice activity and measurement errors are studied. The results indicate that DFH can significantly improve performance compared to random frequency hopping. For example, at a 2% frame error rate with 90% coverage, the capacity improvement of DFH is almost 100% when compared with fixed channel assignment, and about 50% when compared to random frequency hopping