Analytic evaluation of the uplink Erlang capacity of CDMA macrocells with hotspot microcells

In this paper we evaluate the uplink user capacity of a macrocell/microcell CDMA system under non-uniform traffic loading conditions. The “hot spots” microcells are embedded within a large macrocell and operate over the same bandwidth as the large cell. The analytic method to compute Erlang user capacity takes into account propagation and shadowing losses, arrival process, multiple access interference and power control of user terminals. The necessary desensitivity in the microcell so that it covers only the region of the hot spot is determined. Also, to calculate the interference in the macrocell and microcells we take into account the soft handoff process and the coverage regions of the microcells.