Wireless Personal Communications (2007) 41: 43–55 DOI: 10.1007/s11277-006-9127-5 C  Springer 2006 W-CDMA Uplink Practical Capacity and Interference Statistics of Rural Highways Cigar-Shaped Microcells with Imperfect Power Control and Finite Transmitted Power BAZIL TAHA-AHMED 1 , MIGUEL CALVO-RAM ´ ON 2 and LEANDRO HARO-ARIET 2 1 Universidad Aut´ onoma de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria de Cantoblanco, Madrid 28049 E-mail: bazil.taha@uam.es 2 Universidad Polit´ ecnica de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid 28040, Spain Abstract. The capacity and the interference statistics of the sectors of the cigar-shaped W-CDMA microcell are studied. A model of 5 microcells is used to analyze the uplink. The microcells are assumed to exist in rural zones. The capacity and the interference statistics of the microcell are studied for different sector range, different antenna side lobe levels, different values of the break point distance, different values of the propagation parameter s 2 and different standard deviation of the power control error. Keywords: W-CDMA, uplink capacity, interference statistics 1. Introduction It is well known that CDMA is characterized as being interference-limited, so reducing the interference results in increasing the capacity. Three techniques are used to reduce the inter- ference: power control (PC) which is essential in the uplink and that can double the downlink capacity, voice activity monitoring that can increase the capacity by 35% and sectorization which can easily double the CDMA capacity when three sectors are used. It is well known that urban microcell shapes may approximately follow the street pattern and that it is possible to have cigar-shaped microcells [1]. The conditions that describe the rural highway cigar-shaped microcells under this study are: • The number of directional sectors of the cigar-shaped microcell is two and a directional antenna is used in each sector. • The sector has typically a range of 1 to 1.5 km. • User speed in rural areas can reach 120 km/h. Figure 1 shows the radiation pattern of the directional antenna used in each sector and the cigar-shaped microcell coverage. Min et al. studied the performance of the CDMA highway microcell using one slope prop- agation model and two slope propagation model without taking into account the interference variance [2]. They have concluded that, the two slope propagation model is more adequate to be used in the study of the microcells capacity. In [3], the Erlang capacity was calculated for a tessellated hexagonal code-division multiple-access (CDMA) cellular system, where transmissions are subject to an inverse fourth-power path-loss law and log-normal fading. Hashem et al. studied the capacity and the interference statistics for hexagonal macrocells for a propagation exponent of 4.0 [4].