Asymmetric FCA for Downlink and Uplink Transmission in Clustered Multihop Cellular Network

Abstract

A clustered multihop cellular network (CMCN) with virtual cells has been proposed to achieve the characteristics of macrocell/microcell hierarchically overlaid architecture by applying clustering techniques. As a complement to the traditional cellular networks, CMCN is able to incorporate the flexibility of ad hoc networks by allowing multihop transmission. In this paper, we first propose to use dedicated information ports (DIPs) as clusterheads for CMCN; then we analyze the performance of fixed channel assignment (FCA) for downlink transmission in CMCN. Two multi-dimensional Markov chain models are developed to study the call blocking probability. Due to the nature of multihop transmission in CMCN, channel assignment for uplink and downlink transmission is different and unbalanced. We then propose an asymmetric FCA (AFCA) for uplink and downlink transmission in CMCN. By making use of the proposed AFCA for uplink and downlink transmission, we can reduce the call blocking probability significantly as compared with the FCA for traditional single-hop cellular networks. The salient contribution is that the proposed CMCN with AFCA scheme can increase the spectrum efficiency and the system capacity by introducing the structure of CMCN with DIPs for virtual microcells.