TABLE OF CONTENTS The capacity of CDMA systems is an extremely important issue in terms of its economic viability because the overall revenue of the operator is proportional to the system capacity. For example, in the simplest case, where all users are provided with the same service offering for the same cost, the revenue of the operator will be maximized if the operator maximizes the number of users in the system, even though the revenue certainly depends on economic factors such as the price and competing operators or services and on the technical limitation of the systems [16], [17]. Another useful application of the system capacity is the system dimensioning. For example, when capacity is evaluated as a function of various system parameters, we may dimension the required size of the target system parameters to accommodate the target offered traffic load.
The capacity of a CDMA system can be defined in several ways. One of its typical definitions is the maximum number of simultaneous users that can be supported by the system while the service quality requirements of each user, such as the data rate, bit error rate (BER), and outage probability, are being satisfied. In the case of FDMA or TDMA systems, the number of frequency slots or the number of time slots corresponds to the system capacity, respectively, as TDMA and FDMA systems tend to run out of frequency channels or time slots before they become capacity or coverage limited. On the other hand, in the...
