A Comparison of Some Channel Assignment Strategies in Large-Scale Mobile Communications Systems

When more than one radio channel is available to serve a mobile customer in a large-scale mobile communications system the strategy used to make the assignment has an effect on system performance. Performance characteristics for five different assignment strategies obtained from a computer simulation are compared in this paper. It was found that the strategy that chooses a channel to be assigned at a base station so that the distance to the next base station using the same channel is a minimum, performs better than a strategy that minimizes the mean square distance to the next "in use" base stations on both sides. Also, it was found that choosing the first available channel encountered in a channel search is a strategy that produces reasonably good system performance.