Introduction

The cellular telephone system is one of the fastest advancing and popularly used wireless systems with an ever increasing user base. Subscribers can enjoy a wide range of services extending from high clarity voice service to high definition video service and finally high speed data service on the move. Owing to this immense benefit offered, wireless cellular systems are replacing their wired telephony counterparts. Today, the subscriber base of cellular telephone systems has crossed the billions user mark throughout the world. This chapter will begin with a brief outline of the development trend of cellular systems from the early analog communication system to the present UMTS and LTE systems. The rest of the chapter will throw light on the fundamentals of the cellular system design focusing on principles of channel reuse, clustering, handover, cause of interference and mitigation procedures.

Development Trend in Cellular Systems

The idea of a cell-based mobile radio system was first proposed at Bells Laboratory in the early 1970s but the commercial deployment of the system was done only in the 1980s after FCC allocated the proposed spectrum. Since then the wireless cellular telephone system has evolved to introduce new services and features. Table 7.1 lists some of the milestones that led to the development of the present cellular system.

The first generation systems were based on the analog communication system. Many standards were developed by different countries–AMPS in the United States, NMT in Scandinavia, NTT in Japan, RC2000 in France and TACS in Europe.