Carrier Planning Issues for TDMA Personal Communication System

Radio spectrum is the most valuable resource for wireless communication, thus high spectrum utilization is mostly desired to increase system economy. With an efficient frequency allocation method and an effective handoff procedure, a personal communication system can be operated with minimal number of carriers while maintaining an acceptable level of system performance, and thereby leading to a better spectrum utilization. In this paper, we study the effect of different channel selection criteria for handoff procedure on carrier planning problem with Block Oriented Network Simulator (BONeS). The results show that the C/I-based channel selection criterion leads to the best performance, and the minimal numbers of carriers required by Personal Access Communications System (PACS) are 16, 13, 10 carriers for propagation environments with path-loss exponent 2.76, 3, 4, respectively.