Dynamic carrier allocation strategies for mobile cellular networks

Dynamic carrier allocation (DCA) refers to the paradigm of dynamically allo cating carriers to cells in cellular networks. Many strategies have been pr oposed. In most of the strategies. each carrier is assigned a priority. Dep ending on how priorities are assigned, DCA strategies are classified into t hree categories: static-priority, dynamic-priority, and hybrid-priority str ategies. In this paper, we investigate the concept of optimal reuse pattern , propose a model for resource planning, and propose three guidelines for p riority assignment in static-and hybrid-priority DCA strategies. These theo retical results shed light on the strength and weakness of existing DCA str ategies and lead us to develop more efficient strategies. Specifically, we propose three DCA strategies: column-wise static-priority, column-wise hybr id-priority and two-step dynamic-priority. We study their performances by s imulation under both uniform and nonuniform traffic distributions. (C) 2001 Academic Press.