DonorList: A new distributed channel allocation scheme for cellular networks

Abstract

One of the most important challenges in cellular networks is to utilize the scarce spectrum allocated to the network in the most efficient way. If the channels are statically allocated to the cells, when a large number of mobile hosts move to the cell, that cell may run out of channels resulting in a high call incompletion rate. To overcome this problem, dynamic channel allocation schemes have been proposed. Among these schemes, distributed dynamic channel allocation approaches resulted in good performance results. Nevertheless, distributed allocation schemes must address the problem of efficient co-channel interference avoidance and reducing messaging overhead issues. In this paper, we introduced a new distributed channel allocation scheme namely the DonorList approach, which decreases the amount of messages required per channel allocation while efficiently handling the co-channel interference problem. We also demonstrate the performance results obtained after extensive simulation studies. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other algorithms recently proposed in the literature.