Capacity of Sectorized Cellular Systems: An Information Theoretic Perspective

Abstract

In this work, we formulate the information theoretic capacity of the sectorized cellular system for the uplink. We model a planar cellular system in which user terminals (UTs) are served by perfect directional antennas dividing the cell coverage area into perfectly non-interfering sectors. Assuming the joint decoding of the signals received at the antennas (hyper-receiver), we find the information theoretic uplink capacity in the presence of a general fading environment. To find the capacity, we apply a known technique to obtain the eigenvalues of a block-circulant matrix with non-circulant blocks. We show how the capacity is increased in comparison to the non-sectorized single antenna system and we investigate the asymptotic behaviour when the number of sectors grows large. We validate the numerical solutions with Monte Carlo simulations for random fading realizations and we interpret the results for the real-world systems