ABSTRACT

The work presented in this web page is part of my Ph.D. research.  The research is conducted at the Laboratory for Communication Engineering (LCE), University of Cambridge, and it studies the channel allocation problem that is associated with wireless network planning.  My research was generously sponsored by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and Adaptive Broadband Limited.

The frequency spectrum that is available to a wireless operator is usually limited.  In order to satisfy the traffic demand in a geographical area, the spectrum needs to be reused.  Frequency reuse causes interference, which degrades the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of a received packet.  Low SNR decreases data throughput in a packet switched network and increases call blocking in a circuit switched network.  Effective channel allocation is one of the methods to reduce the level of interference, which then improve the SNR. 

Channel allocation is a NP-complete problem, and the increase in demand for wireless service increases the base station density of a network.  Owning to this, the level of difficulty of the channel allocation problem increases with the increase in base station density of a network.  This research focuses on channel allocation methods for a packet based Broadband Fixed Wireless Access (BFWA) network.  Three channel allocation methods are proposed, and their performance are compared with existing channel allocation methods using the OPNET Modeler network simulation tool.

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