A Novel Co-operative Channel Assignment Scheme for Indoor Base Stations

This paper presents a co-operation technique of channel assignment (CA) for indoor base stations (BSs). Indoor BSs are most of the time deployed by users in an ad-hoc manner which makes prior network planning by network operators impossible. If the same pool of radio resources (e.g channels) is used by close BSs, co-operation between these BSs is vital for resolving problems such as interference. In the proposed scheme, femtocell base station (FBS), which is a typical example of indoor BS, is considered. FBSs in close proximity exchange UE-assisted (User Equipment) measured reference power information, and based on individual position of each FBS, inter-BS interaction is used to form clusters. In each cluster, the cluster-head (CH) uses channel assignment tables to assign channel resources to clustermembers (CMs) in a distributed manner. This scheme helps to ensure that the interest of neighbor BSs is always considered whenever a BS makes use of the available network resources. Our simulation results show that co-operative CA using a clusterbased approach yields higher average user throughput than autonomous channel selection by individual BSs. Keywords-: indoor BS; femtocell; cluster; channel assignment;