Design trade-offs in cellular/PCS systems

With the increasing demand for all kinds of wireless access services, including cellular/PCS, wireless local loop, and broadband access, the system architects will have opportunities to design new communication systems, not necessarily based on existing wireless standards. In the design of wireless communication systems, there are usually multiple objectives such as low cost, small size, high reliability, and large capacity. The system architect would need to study the trade-offs among different combinations of modulation, coding, multiple access, and antenna techniques to determine the best design. In this tutorial we focus on the trade-offs between user bandwidth and multi-user interference in order to maximize the system capacity. The design trade-offs are depicted on a B-γ₀ plane. Where B is the user bandwidth and γ₀ is the carrier-to-interference ratio (C/I). For F/TDMA and CDMA systems, the author first shows that the contours of equal system capacity are straight lines with different slope´s depending on the propagation environment, and the capacity decreases for increasing B and γ₀. Then as feasible solutions, the author plots the different combinations of modulation and coding with diversity to satisfy a certain quality of service in a multipath environment. The best design is obtained by moving a line with a certain slope from the lower left corner in the B-γ₀ plane until it touches the first feasible solution. From these plots we can see that, for example, while 1/2-rate channel coding is the best choice for F/TDMA systems, 1/3-rate is better for CDMA systems