Dynamic Channel Assignment: Increasing Capacity and Reducing Power Consumption in Channelized Wireless Systems

The evolution of mobile wireless communication, triggered by an ever growing need for high capacity and new services, has fueled the interest in finding more efficient ways of managing the system resources. The most important of those resources are radio spectrum and power. Dynamic Channel Assignment (DCA) enables a more efficient use of the spectrum and eliminates the burden of frequency planning. In this monograph, we compare the performance of a number of distributed DCA schemes and propose a novel algorithm well suited to mobility environments. Power, in turn, is both a scarce resource at mobile devices and a constraining factor in systems inherently limited by interference. This has led to the development of a variety of power control (PC) schemes. We quantify the impact of mobility on the performance of PC as well as the degradation associated with imperfect signal and interference estimation. Despite the activity in both the DCA and PC arenas, little had been done to try to effectively integrate them. We investigate the integration of DCA and PC and create a family of integrated algorithms, fully distributed and adaptive, that deliver superior performance.