On the effectiveness of channel segregation as a channel allocation method in a variety of cellular structures

Channel allocation or assignment problems have been studied intensively in the literature for the last 25 years. Current directions of this work appear to be in the area of self-organizing or distributed allocation methods, and the type of cellular arrays involved are moving toward complex mixed or hierarchical structures rather than simple arrays of macrocells or microcells. Channel segregation is a distributed dynamic channel allocation method, which has been shown to work well in simple arrays. Hence we investigate how transportable this approach is to mixed cellular systems. Further, we investigate the gains offered by hybrids of channel segregation and fixed channel allocation and study the stability of the channel segregation approach. Results are given that indicate that channel segregation (or hybrids) is a stable allocation method that performs very well unchanged for certain mixed cellular layouts.