Efficient distributed channel allocation for mobile cellular networks

There are two approaches to design a distributed channel allocation algorithms: search and update. The update approach has shorter acquisition delay and lower call blocking rate, but higher message complexity. On the other hand, the search approach has lower message complexity, but longer acquisition delay and higher call blocking rate. In this paper we first propose a novel distributed acquisition algorithm, which has similar message complexity as the search approach and similar acquisition delay as the update approach. Then, we present a channel selection algorithm and integrate it into our distributed acquisition algorithm. By a rigorous analysis in terms of delay and message complexity, we show that our channel acquisition algorithm performs significantly better than the update approach (Dong and Lai 1997) and the search approach (Prakash et al. 1995). Detailed simulation experiments are carried out in order to evaluate our proposed methodology. The performance of our algorithm is compared with those of the geometric strategy (Baiocchi et al. 1995), the search approach, and the update approach. Simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms all other approaches in terms of call blocking probability under uniform as well as non-uniform traffic.