Telecommunications Essentials

Spectrum Reuse

The wireless spectrum is limited—wireless is like having one invisible cable in the sky that the whole world has to share. This is one of the major limitations of wireless, and we need techniques for efficiently using the spectrum that we do have. There are several methods for reusing spectrum.

The first step is to apply space division; you carve up the service area into smaller coverage areas. The key purpose of space division is to reuse frequencies across the coverage areas, or cells. The second step is to apply a multiple access technique, to allow the sharing of spectrum by multiple users. After you have delineated the space and combined multiple conversations onto one channel, you can then apply spread spectrum, duplexing, ...