Abstract
Previous approaches to sizing the carrier spacing for voice-oriented cellular systems have been based on the outage requirement. However, such a design paradigm needs to be changed as the performance of most upcoming cellular systems employing adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) techniques is more sensitive to throughput than outage. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to determining the carrier spacing which is based on a throughput criterion. The proposed method reflects well the characteristics of throughput-sensitive cellular systems that transport multimedia traffic. Numerical results show that our approach requires less carrier spacing, thus leading to more efficient spectrum utilization.