A Shannon-theoretic view of Wyner's multiple-access cellular channel model in the presence of fading

Shannon-theoretic limits on the achievable throughput for a simple cellular multiple-access channel (MAC) model, (referred to as the Wyner's model (1994)) in the presence of flat fading are presented. Both linear and planar cellular arrays are considered using intra-cell time division multiple access (TDMA) and the wide-band (WB) protocols. We are interested in the maximum reliably transmitted equal rate (MER). We demonstrate, the rather surprising result, that Rayleigh fading may increase the MER under certain conditions as compared to the non-faded case in both, TDMA and WB strategies. In this setting the WB strategy which achieves the maximum reliably equal rate of the model, is superior to the TDMA scheme. An asymptotically tight (in the number of users per cell) upper bound for the MER of the WB scheme shows that the presence of fading improves on performance over the non-faded case independently of the non-negative fading coefficients statistics.