An access strategy for downlink and uplink decoupling in multi-channel wireless networks

With the increasing popularity of smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there has been an increase in the amount of mobile traffic on networks. In this paper, we discuss an access strategy for downlink/uplink decoupling (DUDe) with multiple frequency channels to enable the efficient use of frequencies in wireless networks. DUDe is a wireless communications scheme that effectively utilizes frequencies when communicating by connecting the uplink and downlink to different base stations. We propose two base station selection methods, i.e., signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR)-based decoupling with re-association (SBD-RA) and SINR-based decoupling with first-come first-association (SBD-FCFA). Based on the evaluation results obtained by event driven simulations, we show that both SBD-FCFA and SBD-RA provide higher throughput by utilizing frequencies more efficiently than DUDe when using the same channel, or without using DUDe. We also show that SBD-RA achieves a high throughput although SBD-RA has a larger computational complexity than SBD-FCFA.