Capacity of a downlink MC-CDMA multi-cell network

In this paper, a new approach to determine the number of cells for a given environment and coverage area is provided for small scale networks. Base stations are located on a square grid of surface A. Each base station covers an area of size αA. The goal is to determine the optimal parameter α in the case of a downlink multi-carrier CDMA scheme where each user is equipped with a matched filter. Two types of codes are studied: random i.i.d and orthogonal (per cell) codes. We show that in the absence of path loss, the cellular architecture depends only on the second and fourth moment of the channel.