On Bandwidth Allocation for Data Dissemination in Cellular Mobile Networks

Wireless bandwidth is a scarce resource in a cellular mobile network. As such, it is important to effectively allocate bandwidth to each cell such that the overall system performance is optimized. Channel allocation strategies have been extensively studied for voice communications in cellular networks. However, for data dissemination applications, studies on bandwidth allocation have thus far been limited to a single-cell environment. This paper investigates the problem of bandwidth allocation for data dissemination in a multi-cell environment, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been investigated before. The performance objective is to minimize the overall expected access latency given the workload for each cell in a data dissemination system. Two heuristic techniques, called compact allocation and cluster-step allocation, are proposed to effectively allocate bandwidth for a cellular network. Simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed bandwidth allocation schemes. Experimental results show that the proposed schemes substantially outperform the uniform allocation and proportional allocation schemes.