Channel Borrowing Without Locking for Asynchronous Hybrid FDMA/TDMA Cellular Communications

The use of real time channel borrowing in digital cellular asynchronous hybrid FDMA/TDMA systems is considered. These systems, which are exemplified by North American digital cellular (IS-54), are asynchronous in the sense that time slots in different cells are not aligned. CBWL (channel borrowing without locking) techniques can be applied but (without cell-to-cell synchronization) borrowing individual time slots from adjacent cells would violate co-channel interference constraints. Instead, frequency carriers can be borrowed. In IS-54, a carrier supports three TDMA slots. So if only one TDMA slot is needed in the borrowing cell, two TDMA slots are unnecessarily transferred. We devised an appropriate carrier borrowing scheme and an analytical model to determine the traffic performance of TDMA/CBWL. Fast carrier returning is used to increase channel utilization by returning borrowed carriers as soon as possible. An efficient computational method that uses macro-states, decomposition, combinatorial analysis and the convolution algorithm is devised to find blocking probabilities. The results show that in comparison with FCA, the new CBWL scheme can significantly improve system performance of asynchronous TDMA cellular systems that use FDMA/TDMA multiplexing.