Factors controlling cell coverage in cellular networks.

The performance and the quality of the provided service of cellular networks can be well determined by the network capacity and the coverage. Good coverage means fewer calls blocking probability, and lower outage during handing-off process. Due to the fading that occurs during signal transmission, the practical cell radius may be less than the radius estimated when considering only the path loss. Therefore, the best design is that consider the probability of cell-edge coverage and the mobile station location variability. This paper addresses the effects of mobile location and antenna heights on cellular network coverage. The paper presents a reliable cell coverage model that considers the mobile position variation in shadowing environments. The proposed model accuracy and the cell coverage probability were simulated with the modified two-ray radio propagation model. The proposed model is applied to predict the cell converge fraction considering shadowing, antennas height, mobile stations location variability, and receiver sensitivity. The simulation results show that the mobile location variability is directly proportional with carrier frequency. Rural environments introduce more location variability than urban environments. Results show that base stations provided with higher antenna can result in better cell coverage percentage and less shadowing effect. For the cellular network designed so that 90% of locations at the cell edge have a reliable coverage, the path loss due to shadowing effects is about 6.9 dB in urban areas, while it is about 8.12 dB in suburban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]