Four-sector cross-shaped urban microcellular systems with intelligent switched-beam antennas

A four-sector cross-shaped urban microcellular system with intelligent switched-beam antennas is proposed. Each sector covers a street block with a base station located at an intersection, and an intelligent beam-switching scheme is used to locate mobile users in the most suitable beam coverage. Due to directional narrow-beam patterns and waveguide effects of tall buildings, radio signals along vertical and horizontal streets do not interfere with each other. Therefore, a channel can be reused simultaneously in multiple neighboring cells as long as cochannels do not encounter each other along the line of sight. The proposed scheme has a channel reuse efficiency of 0.95 for a traffic load of 0.02 [new-call arrivals/s/cell]. The system also increases system capacity more than three times with a blocking probability of 1% and considerably reduces handoff traffic when compared with a conventional cross-shaped microcellular system with an omnidirectional beam pattern.