Impact of the cell size and the propagation model parameters on the performance of microcellular networks

The effects of cell radius reduction and path loss model parameters on the performance of microcellular networks are studied. The performance is measured in terms of the average co-channel interference probability and reuse efficiency. The influence of reuse distance, cell size, traffic intensity, break point distance of the dual path loss law characteristics of microcells, and standard deviation of log-normal shadowed local mean on the performance parameters are investigated. Also, capacity increase due to cell radius reduction combined with dynamic channel assignment strategies (DCA) is evaluated. Our main contribution is the observation that the system performance is extremely sensitive to the propagation model parameters and depends strongly on the cell size and reuse factor. As it is expected, analytical and simulation results show that reducing the cell radius increases the cell's Erlang capacity per unit area. However, this cell radius reduction implies an increase in the co-channel interference level and then a higher reuse factor may be required to keep the quality of service. On the other hand, it is shown that the system capacity increase due to the cell radius reduction is much greater in microcellular systems with DCA than in those with fixed channel assignment.