A new channel reservation scheme to reduce call blocking in cellular networks

Cellular operators are facing difficulties in supporting a huge increment in the subscribers due to spectrum and equipment restrictions. There have been many proposals in the area of increasing call carrying capacity such as Reuse Partitioning and Directed Retry. However, such action increases the size of the network and results to higher installation, maintenance and optimization costs for the cellular operator. In this paper we are proposing a cost effective new channel reservation scheme based on subscribers' average call duration which can be implemented in any existing cell. A cell has been considered which has very few allocated channels and is also unable to execute load balancing methods such as channel borrowing, call transfer etc. Also, the average call duration of the subscribers are taken in the range of 0 - 40 minutes. A cell with such restrictions may have higher blocking probability, but the results show that the proposed channel allocation scheme can effectively reduce the overall call-blocking for such cell. This scheme is particularly useful in a cell having heavy traffic with mostly business calls.