Spatial Frequency Reuse in a Novel Generation of PMR Networks

International audiencePrivate Mobile Radio (PMR) networks are cellular infrastructures dedicated to be used by professionals, such as public safety, military, industry and transportation organizations. In those networks, resources are scarce, and there are strong Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. The emergence of new services which need more bandwidth has made the world PMR leader focus on the LTE-Advanced protocol. In order to ensure the QoS despite resource shortage, we propose an algorithm of Resource Blocks (RBs) allocation with spatial frequency reuse whose scheme takes into account users' (UEs') interference possibility and probability. We start by defining the underlying problem, which we call Weighted Fractional Coloring Problem (WFCP), in terms of graph theory. Next, we prove its NP-hardness. As obtaining an exact solution of such a problem in reasonable time is unrealistic, we propose a heuristic algorithm. In order to evaluate the performance of our algorithm we use a rigorous validation procedure. We compare its performance with that of a random one which we propose as a reference and the exact one which can be run on very small networks. Thanks to the results obtained we believe that the proposed algorithm can establish a solid starting point to conceive its distributed versions for novel PMR protocols