A Distributed Algorithm for Dynamic Channel Allocation

Recent demand for mobile telephone service has been growing rapidly while the electro-magnetic spectrum of frequencies allocated for this purpose remains limited. Any solution to the channel assignment problem is subject to this limitation, as well as the interference constraint between adjacent channels in the spectrum. Channel allocation schemes provide a flexible and efficient access to bandwidth in wireless and mobile communication systems. In this paper, we present an efficient distributed algorithm for dynamic channel allocation based upon mutual exclusion model, where the channels are grouped by the number of cells in a cluster and each group of channels cannot be shared concurrently within the cluster. We discuss the algorithm and prove its correctness. We also show that the algorithm requires at most (worst case) O(N _gN _n logN _n) messages, where N _g is the number of groups and N _n is the number of neighbors. This is compared to Choy's algorithm which requires O(N _g ²N _n), where N _g is the number of groups and N _n is the number of neighboring cells in the system. We report our algorithm's performance with several channel systems using different types of call arrival patterns. Our results indicate that significant low denial rate, low message complexity and low acquisition time can be obtained using our algorithm.