Enhancing Cell Edge Performance in Cellular Mobile System

Abstract

Cell edge effect has been recently paid much attention in the development of new mobile communication systems because it can cause serious performance degradation in the cell edge. The cell edge problem is essentially due to non-uniform distribution of the radio power of cellular systems. It can be softened to a certain extent by using new radio architecture called distributed antenna system (DAS). In traditional collocated antenna system (CAS), multiple antennas are centrally located at the BSs, while in the DAS, multiple antennas of BS called remote antenna unit (RAUs) are separately and remotely located in a cell and connected to a baseband processing unit (BPU) via high speed backbone links. Since the distance between the mobile terminals (MTs) and the antenna of the BS is greatly reduced by introducing RAUs, the large path loss of the radio signals can be avoided. The objective is to tackle the shortcomings due to the cell edge effects in a cellular system by suitably changing the existing collocated antenna system (CAS) to a distributed antenna system (DAS) and to compare its performance. The performance analysis namely bit error rate (BER) and capacity were performed and the results are shown. It is inferred from the results that the proposed DAS scheme outperforms the existing CAS scheme.