Increasing System Capacity in GERAN by Means of TRX Power Reduction

In this paper we propose an efficient and simple method to improve system capacity in GSM/GPRS/EDGE radio systems. It exploits the power shaping concept and the parameter "TRX power reduction" already present in the standard and does not require major modifications to operators specific radio resource management algorithms. Power-shaping means assigning in advance (static allocation) a maximum power level to each channel before dynamically performing channel allocation. This is done by exploiting a set of suitably reused power profiles that partially organize the inter-cell interference in the available channels and make it partially predictable. This technique, thanks to the possibility of tightening the reuse factor, permits to increase the system capacity for both voice and data services if compared to most common reuse schemes or to the widely used concentric cells schemes. This is shown in the results where an interesting gain is achieved by power shaping with power reduction with respect to the other schemes.