Optimized Hybrid Resource Allocation in Wireless Cellular Networks with and without Channel Reassignment

Abstract

In cellular networks, it is important to determine an optimal channel assignment scheme so that the available channels, which are considered as “limited” resources in cellular networks, are used as efficiently as possible. The objective of the channel assignment scheme is to minimize the call-blocking and the call-dropping probabilities. In this paper, we present two efficient integer linear programming (ILP) formulations, for optimally allocating a channel (from a pool of available channels) to an incoming call such that both “hard” and “soft” constraints are satisfied. Our first formulation, ILP1, does not allow channel reassignment of the existing calls, while our second formulation, ILP2, allows such reassignment. Both formulations can handle hard constraints, which includes co-site and adjacent channel constraints, in addition to the standard co-channel constraints. The simplified problem (with only co-channel constraints) can be treated as a special case of our formulation. In addition to the hard constraints, we also consider soft constraints, such as, the packing condition, resonance condition, and limiting rearrangements, to further improve the network performance. We present the simulation results on a benchmark 49 cell environment with 70 channels that validate the performance of our approach.