A Novel Predictive Dynamic Channel Allocation Scheme for Improving Power Saving and Mobility in Broadband Wireless Access Networks

The radio spectrum of the IEEE 802.16 medium access control (MAC) protocol ranges from 2 to 66 GHz, which is one of potential solutions for broadband wireless access (BWA) or beyond third generation (B3G)/4G networks. However, with the characteristic of radio propagation, the maximum transmission distance is proportioned inversely to the frequency which the mobile subscriber station (MSS) carries. According to this property, the channel allocation can be based on how far the distance between the SS and the base station (BS) in a cell. Therefore, in this paper, we first propose a new channel allocation model for BWA in the macrocell and investigate the relations between the signal propagation and the distance as well as propose a signal-aware dynamic channel allocation (SDCA) scheme for dynamic channel allocation (DCA) in BWA networks (BWANs). The SDCA enables the BS to allocate appropriate channels to MSSs according to the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) value from the MSSs. Besides, according to the frequency, the SDCA can estimate a minimum power for MSS to communicate. The SDCA not only increases the capacity of the system but saves the overall power consumption of the system well. We also present a new out-of-service prevention scheme for supporting mobility in the system. Simulation results show that the proposed SDCA increases the channel utilization by up to 89% over the original IEEE 802.16 standard specifications.