Capacity Estimation of OFDMA-Based Wireless Cellular Networks

The usage of wireless cellular network architecture increases the capacity of a wireless system, by combining cells into clusters in which channels are uniquely assigned per cell and reusing such clusters throughout the network. Unfortunately, a cellular network system may become interference limited regarding its capacity instead of noise/range limited due to intensive resources reuse like time, frequency and space. Using as input the physical layer parameters and deployment scenario, an analytical approach is proposed for capacity estimation of networks based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) technology whose subchannels are composed of distributed subcarriers. This innovative approach is based on a new analytical method for SINR calculation based on a proposed subcarrier collision probability model. The usage of such method is exemplified for a single-hop sectorized Mobile WiMAX cellular network and the results are validated against published works.