Outage Probability in Mobile Telephony with Directive Antennas and Macrodiversity

Signal-to-interference ratio statistics for mobile telephony systems with hexagonal coverage areas, multiple interferers, and threecorner base stations are investigated. Corner base stations simultaneously reduce total interference (because of antenna directivity) and provide macrodiversity against shadow fading. Our results indicate that for 3 or 7 channel sets, with 2 tiers of interferers and typical system parameters (propagation exponent of 3.7 and lognormal spread of 8 dB), the improvement is on the order of 11 dB over a baseline arrangement which employs centrally located omnibase stations without macrodiversity. Additional considerations of blocking probabilities and average voice activity indicate possible further improvements.