MCAS: a macrocell channel allocation scheme for broadband wireless access networks

The radio spectrum of the IEEE 802.16 medium access control (MAC) protocol ranges from 2 to 66 GHz, which is one of the potential solutions for broadband wireless access (BWA) or beyond third generation (B3G)/4G networks. However, with the characteristic of radio propagation, the maximum transmission distance is proportioned inversely to the frequency which the subscriber station (SS) carries. According to this property, the base station (BS) can easily allocate appropriate channels for SSs according to the received signals which SSs transmit. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the relationship between the signal propagation and the distance, and then we proposed a novel macrocell channel allocation scheme (MCAS) for dynamic channel allocation (DCA) in radio access networks (RAN). The MCAS enables the BS to allocate appropriate channels to SSs according to the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) value from the SSs. The MCAS not only increases the capacity of the system but also saves the overall power consumption of the system well. Simulation results show that the proposed MCAS increases the power saving up to 47.83% over the original IEEE 802.16 standard specifications.