Abstract
In this paper, we consider cluster-based micro/picocellular networks with overlapped cell-clusters. Channel assignment and hand-off policies are essential and important policies in cellular wireless networks. The issue of how different channel assignment and hand-off policies in the overlapped areas affect the overall system performance has not yet been studied in the literature. This paper provides a thorough study and understanding of this issue. We propose two cluster channel assignment policies, namely, partitioned and shared cluster channel assignment policies, and two hand-off policies, namely, boundary and early hand-off policies. The proposed cluster channel assignment policies and hand-off policies are combined to obtain three different strategies, namely, partitioned-boundary, partitioned-early, and shared-boundary strategies. Extensive simulations are used to study the performance of the strategies. Our results show that the partitioned-early and shared-boundary strategies produce significantly lower hand-off dropping and forced termination probabilities than the partitioned-boundary strategy. The partitioned-early and shared-boundary strategies yield similar performance. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.