CHANNEL ASSIGNMENT WITH LIMITED CHANNEL-SHARING IN CELLULAR NETWORKS - A HOMOGENEOUS ANALYSIS

The granularity of frequency reuse of the conventional approach for ch annel assignment is a cluster (a partition of a coverage area), That m eans that the channels used in cells (partitions of a cluster) within the same cluster are distinctive, In this paper, we propose a differen t approach for channel assignment such that the channels are reused am ong cells in the same cluster, However, there are two constraints on t he reuse of channels in a cluster to keep the cochannel interference i n check. First, adjacent cells are not allowed to use the same channel s, Second, the number of ''one-hop-away'' cells assigned the same chan nels is limited. The approach we take is based on the theory of finite projective planes. Bg mapping the sets of points of a finite projecti ve plane to the channels assigned to a cell, channel reuse is achieved within a cluster, The performance evaluation is done in three parts, In the first part, we show that the channel reuse efficiency of the pr oposed approach is higher than that of the conventional approach with a tradeoff of a lower signal-to-interference (SII) ratio, In the secon d part, the S/I is kepi the same, and we demonstrate that the proposed approach has a higher channel reuse efficiency when the cluster size is reasonably small, In the third part, the worst case analysis for th e situation that mobile users roam around the cell boundary is illustr ated and a strategy of channel allocation is provided to avoid the wor st case conditions.