Operation and Performance of Link-Quality Based Channel Assignment Schemes in Adaptive Packet-Switched Mobile Radio Systems

This paper proposes and evaluates a set of physical level assisted cross-layer channel assignment schemes. These schemes allocate an incoming call the available channel that experienced the best channel quality conditions during previous transmissions. To estimate such conditions, three different link quality metrics have been considered. The performance of the proposed schemes has been compared to that of the commonly employed random allocation mechanism. The obtained results show that the proposed schemes improve the system performance of an adaptive packet-switched mobile radio system while also exhibiting the long-term channel uniform use characteristic of the random allocation mechanism. The higher performance attained with the proposed schemes is due to their short-term channel use pattern that results in an implicit cooperation among co-channel interfering cells during the channel allocation process. With the proposed schemes, interfering cells avoid assigning the same channels to simultaneous incoming calls, therefore reducing the experienced interference and increasing the system performance.