Analysis and coloring of a shotgun cellular system

This paper analyzes cellular systems where the base stations are placed at random. Analysis compares the base station to mobile link in random systems to ideal hexagonal systems. Under log-normal shadow fading and sectorizing-but no channel planning-the random system has carrier to interference levels within 4 dB and spectral efficiency within 2 dB of the hexagonal system. A simple linear-time channel assignment algorithm reduces each of these differences by 1 dB. Thus, at a modest cost in performance, deployment costs and deployment speed can be greatly reduced.