Performance comparison of channel allocation techniques in packet-switched mobile communication networks

Channel allocation techniques are responsible for deciding which available channel is assigned to new transmissions. Since channel quality conditions and dynamics experienced during data transmissions can be affected by the mechanism used to assign free channels, this paper proposes and evaluates different channel allocation techniques in an adaptive packet-switched mobile radio network. The common criteria used for all the techniques under consideration is to assign incoming calls the available channel that experienced the best channel quality in previous transmissions. The difference between the proposed algorithms is the metric used to evaluate the channel quality. In particular three metrics are considered: BER, BLER and mean CIR. The results obtained highlight considerable performance improvements compared to other traditional techniques, such as random channel allocation.