Cell Edge Performance of Cellular Mobile Systems

Cell edge effect has been recently paid much attention in the development of new generation mobile communications systems because it can cause serious performance degradation in cell edge. In this paper, the cell edge effects of traditional cellular systems and distributed cellular systems are evaluated and compared in environments with or without inter-cell interference (ICI). Three performance metrics are proposed to quantify the cell edge effect of cellular systems. A lower bound is derived on the location-specific spectral efficiency of the collocated antenna system (CAS). Both an approximate expression and an iterative method to quantify the location-specific spectral efficiency of the distributed antenna system (DAS) are presented. Moreover, based on these results, the proposed performance metrics are analyzed and discussed. Finally, numerical results for typical configurations of the cellular systems are presented to validate the theoretical results, and it is also shown that the cell edge performance of the DAS is better than that of the CAS.