A high-capacity wireless network by quad-sector cell and interleaved channel assignment

We propose an improved sectorization scheme, called narrow-beam quad-sector cell (NBQC) for cellular networks, in which each cell is divided into four sectors and each sector is covered by a 60/spl deg/ antenna. The NBQC structure allows easy implementation of the concept of interleaved channel assignment (ICA), which can take full advantage of antenna directivity. With ICA, the NBQC system can enhance the system performance from several perspectives. First, the NBQC has better coverage performance than the current three-sector cellular architecture. Second, we demonstrate that in a typical radio environment, the NBQC system ran achieve a reuse cluster size N=2 with the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) as high as 11 dB in 90% of the cell area, which is a 3-5-dB improvement over the existing cellular architectures. Third, as compared to the most advanced three-sector clover-leaf cell architecture with reuse cluster size N=3, the NBQC system with ICA can achieve reuse cluster size N=2 with very slight degradation in SIR performance, thereby still improving the system capacity by about 10% over a wide range of ninetieth percentile SIR requirements.