Dynamic Carrier Allocation Strategies for Mobile Cellular Networks

In dynamic carrier allocation (DCA) strategies, carriers are assigned priorities. Based upon how priorities are assigned to carriers, DCA strategies are classified into three classes: static-priority, dynamic-priority, and hybrid-priority strategies. In this paper, we lay out a theoretical foundation for DCA strategies: we first develop the concept of optimal reuse pattern and then propose a model for resource planning as well as three guiding principles for priority assignment in staticand hybrid-priority DCA strategies. These theoretical results will shed light on the strength and weakness of existing DCA strategies and lead us to developing more efficient strategies. Specifically, we propose three new DCA strategies: Column-Wise static-priority (CWSP), Column-Wise hybridpriority (CWHP), and Two-Step dynamic-priority (TSDP). The CWSP and CWHP strategies are obtained from the Geometric strategy by following our guiding principles for priority assignment. The TSDP strategy, on the other hand, was derived from the Nanda-Goodman strategy by applying our notion of optimal reuse patterns. It not only attempts to reuse carriers as compactly as possible (just as other dynamic-priority strategies do), but also goes one step further by bringing the actual carrier reuse pattern closer to the optimal pattern. The performance of the three new DCA strategies are simulated under both uniform and non-uniform traffic distributions. The simulation results show that each one of the three new DCA strategies outperforms existing strategies in its own class, and the TSDP strategy has the best performance among all DCA strategies.