DOWNLINK OUTAGE PREDICTIONS FOR CELLULAR RADIO SYSTEMS

A general model for predicting downlink outage due to co-channel interference in cellular radio systems is presented. The model accounts for path loss, log-normal shadowing, Rayleigh fading, and vehicle velocity. The outage predictions are obtained by computer simulation. Various outage control techniques are evaluated, including cell sectoring, transmitter power control, and hand-offs. It is shown that downlink power control is quite useful when hand-offs are used, and that shadowing can have a large effect on the outage predictions. The outage predictions are applied to a digital cellular system that uses quadrature differential phase shift keying (QDPSK) modulation and Reed-Solomon (RS) coding. It is shown that the performance of a coded digital cellular system is largely limited by rapidly moving vehicles.