Analytic Evaluation of the Maximum Uplink Erlang Capacity of a Cellular CDMA System With Macrocells and Embedded Hotspot Microcells

In this paper, we evaluate the maximum uplink user capacity of a macrocell/microcell cellular 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 accounts 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, we take into account the soft handoff process and the coverage regions of the microcells for the calculating of the interference in the macrocells and microcells. An analytic expression is obtained for Erlang capacity and for the maximum capacity, which depends of the interference factors and the number of embedded microcells.