System design choices in personal communications

The authors outline techniques for dealing with variable propagation conditions for single user channels. They perform comparisons of interference averaging and avoidance multiple access strategies for cellular systems, with capacity as a function of minimum acceptable signal to interference ratio. They discuss some interference suppression methods. Multiple base stations are presented as a means of further increasing capacity. Throughout all of the above, the discussion is centered on connection-oriented traffic such as voice and video, with communication mediated by a network of base stations. The authors then discuss three different personal communication systems being developed at UCLA, illustrating some of the design trade-offs available in achieving low power consumption, high spectral efficiency, and flexible network topology. They conclude with a summary of their perception of the system design choices available at the physical layer.>