Performance of Multi-carrier Technology over VHF Channels for Rural Area Applications

Abstract

This paper focuses on the application of multi-carrier technologies in rural area communications on very high frequency (VHF) channels. Our target is to analyze the performance of typical long-term evolution (LTE) technology on three specific rural scenarios: (i) high density of users in specific regions, (ii) high inter-cell interference regions, and (iii) high demand of similar services. These scenarios operate in very high frequency (VHF) channels to support rural connectivity.Numerical results are obtained via system-level simulations using the ns-3 simulator, whose settings were calibrated based on real LTE deployments on VHF.We specifically assess the performance of available frequency reuse techniques showing that typical solutions for cellular networks may lead to remarkable throughput differences in these extreme scenarios. The simulation results showed that hard frequency reuse – which has a poor performance in typical scenarios – outperforms all other studied options in the proposed study-case.