Wireless Communications Principles and Practice, Second Edition

Chapter 3. The Cellular Concept—System Design Fundamentals

The design objective of early mobile radio systems was to achieve a large coverage area by using a single, high powered transmitter with an antenna mounted on a tall tower. While this approach achieved very good coverage, it also meant that it was impossible to reuse those same frequencies throughout the system, since any attempts to achieve frequency reuse would result in interference. For example, the Bell mobile system in New York City in the 1970s could only support a maximum of twelve simultaneous calls over a thousand square miles [Cal88]. Faced with the fact that government regulatory agencies could not make spectrum allocations in proportion to the increasing demand for mobile ...