Channel coding strategies for cellular radio

To improve re-use of time/frequency slots in a cellular radio system, it is desirable for the average interference levels seen by all users to be made approximately equal. The authors provide constructions based on orthogonal latin squares that guarantee different sets of users will interfere in successive slots. When signal to interference ratios are independent from successive symbols, channel codes can provide a large diversity gain which is far in excess of the gain against additive noise. Consequently, coding with interleaving fits together very naturally with this construction. The authors illustrate how to achieve large performance improvement using convolutional codes with low decoding delay in a slow hopped system