SINGLE-CHANNEL USER-CAPACITY CALCULATIONS FOR SELF-ORGANIZING CELLULAR-SYSTEMS

One important quantity in assessing the viability of local, autonomous , dynamic channel allocation for microcellular systems is user capacit y, defined as the average number of users per channel per cell. Here, we determine the capacity for infinite linear and planar arrays of mic rocells using a very idealized environment. In particular, propagation and interference considerations are simply represented by the constra int that, if a channel is used in a given cell, it cannot be used in R -consecutive rings of cells around that cell. We investigate the eleme ntary case where there is only a single channel available for use in t he system. Using this representation, we compute the best and worst us er capacities as well as the capacity achieved by random channel place ment. While the environment under which these capacities are derived i s highly idealized, the results are useful in two important ways. Firs t, the best capacity and the random channel placement capacity we find here for single-channel, self-organized access are fundamental for co mputing the traffic characteristics of important multichannel dynamic channel allocation algorithms. Second, the random channel placement ca pacity is close enough to the best that can be achieved to suggest tha t local, autonomously implemented, dynamic channel allocation loses li ttle capacity when compared with centrally administered fixed channel allocation.