A New Approach to Efficient Channel Assignment for Hexagonal Cellular Networks

Abstract

Given a hexagonal cellular network with specific demand Vector and frequency separation constraints, we introduce the concept of a critical block of the network, that leads us to an efficient channel assignment scheme for the whole network. A novel idea of partitioning the critical block into several smaller sub-networks with homogeneous demands has been introduced which provides an elegant way of assigning frequencies to the critical block. This idea of partitioning is then extended for assigning frequencies to the rest of the network. The proposed algorithm provides an optimal assignment for all well-known benchmark instances including the most difficult two. It is shown to be superior to the existing frequency assignment algorithms, reported so far, in terms of both bandwidth requirement and computation time.