Distributed Wireless Channel Allocation in Networks with Mobile Base Stations

In traditional cellular systems with fixed base stations the channel reuse pattern is static and deterministic. When the cell layout is dynamic, due to the mobility of base stations, the cluster of cells within co-channel interference range changes with time. Consequently, the channel reuse pattern is highly dynamic. Moreover, base stations also need wireless channels to communicate amongst themselves. A communication session between a pair of nodes may have to switch channels due to the movement of other nodes into the neighborhood. Hence, there is a need for new wireless channel allocation algorithms for virtual cellular systems with mobile base stations. In this paper, principles of mutual exclusion pertaining to distributed computing systems are employed to develop such an algorithm. The interbase station wireless links are referred to as backbone links while the base station-mobile node links are referred to as short-hop links. The proposed algorithm is distributed, dynamic and deadlock free. Disjoint sets of channels are used for backbone and short-hop links. The distributed nature of the channel allocation scheme leads to robustness as the responsibility is no longer centralized at the MTSO. Instead, it is shared among all the mobile base stations. This also makes the algorithm scalable.