Dynamic carrier allocation strategies for mobile cellular networks

Dynamic carrier allocation (DCA) refers to the paradigm of dynamically allocating carriers to cells in cellular networks. Many strategies have been proposed. In most of the strategies. each carrier is assigned a priority. Depending on how priorities are assigned, DCA strategies are classified into three categories: static-priority, dynamic-priority, and hybrid-priority strategies. In this paper, we investigate the concept of optimal reuse pattern, propose a model for resource planning, and propose three guidelines for priority assignment in static-and hybrid-priority DCA strategies. These theoretical results shed light on the strength and weakness of existing DCA strategies and lead us to develop more efficient strategies. Specifically, we propose three DCA strategies: column-wise static-priority, column-wise hybrid-priority and two-step dynamic-priority. We study their performances by simulation under both uniform and nonuniform traffic distributions. (C) 2001 Academic Press.