NACR: A New Adaptive Channel Reservation in CellularCommunications Systems

International audienceFuture Personal Communication Networks (PCN) will employ microcells and picocells to support a higher capacity, thus increasing the frequency of handoff calls. Forced call terminations due to handoff call blocking are generally more objectionable than new call blocking. The proposed guard channel schemes for radio channel allocation in cellular networks reduce handoff call blocking probability at the expense of increases in new call blocking probability by giving resource access priority to handoff calls over new calls in call admission control. Under uniform traffic assumptions, it has been shown that a fixed number of guard channels leads to good performance results. In a more realistic system, non-uniform traffic conditions should be considered. In this case, the achieved call blocking probability may deviate significantly from the desired objective. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive guard channel scheme: New Adaptive Channel Reservation (NACR). In NACR, for a given period of time, a given number of channels are guarded in each cell for handoff traffic. An approximate analytical model of NACR is presented. Tabu search method has been implemented in order to optimize the grade of service. Discrete event simulations of NACR were run. The effectiveness of the proposed method is emphasized on a complex configuration