Scheduled Transmissions for Interference Reduction

For EDGE compact, certain radio transmissions are scheduled to avoid co-carrier interference at the same time. The standards group recognized that the smallest practical frequency plan for use with EDGE cells is n = 4. A frequency plan characterized by n = 3 uses 1/3 of the allocated EDGE carrier frequencies in each cell possibly just one carrier frequency at first in each cell, supporting several EDGE users on its various time slots. This particular example, with one carrier frequency per cell, would only require that 600 kHz of spectrum be assigned to EDGE in the early installations. However, using a three-cell frequency plan for EDGE presents a serious problem in configuration of a working system since the c / (i + n) ratio will be smaller than is desired. In the future, a more desirable frequency plan for EDGE would use four or possibly seven cells. This is likely to be used only after the amount of EDGE (and likely also GSM voice) traffic in the system is very substantial so that the amount of radio spectrum devoted to EDGE is no longer an issue.

The initial use of a frequency reuse of n = 3 will produce more errors in all data, but particularly for call-processing-related messages such as packet paging, packet access grant, and the like,...