In 3G-based multi-hop cellular networks (MCNs), the cell size affects the cell capacity and the network reachability, which in turn affect the total demand of source nodes that can be served or the system throughput. Improper cell size assignment greatly affects the performance of the networks. To address the cell size issue, we recently proposed the Optimal Cell Size (OCS) scheme to find optimal cell sizes to maximize the system throughput for a 3G TDD W-CDMA MCN. Although OCS provides an

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... al cell size solution, it is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a heuristic cell size scheme, called Small Cell Size First (SCSF), which is more efficient and provides good results in terms of throughput compared to the optimal solutions provided by OCS. SCSF outperforms the fixed small cell size (SCS) multi-hop case when the network is sparse and the large cell size single-hop case regardless of the network density.