Dynamic Channel Assignment for Downlink and Uplink Decoupling in Wireless Networks

The demand for wireless communication capacity continues to increase with the extensive usage of smartphones, tablets, and devices that are related to the Internet of Things (IoT). However, devices and base stations are diversified, and base stations of various sizes are mixed. In existing cellular networks, the transmission powers of the base stations are different. If the downlink received power from the base station that belongs to the device is maximum, the uplink received power from the device at the base station is not always the maximum. This study maximizes the power that is received from the device through downlink-uplink decoupling (DUDe). DUDe can improve the spectral efficiency by selecting the downlink base station and the uplink base station independently in a network with base stations with different transmission powers. This study focuses on two technologies, DUDe and the dynamic channel assignment (DCA). It proposes an association algorithm to solve the dynamic combinational optimization problem for uplink and downlink cellular networks separately using DUDe. When a user device arrives, it first connects to the base station that has the maximum capacity at that time. Subsequently, by using the base station assignment at that time as an individual, the proposed method performs a more optimal base station assignment with DCA by using a genetic algorithm. The computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve up to a 140 % higher spectral efficiency than the existing DUDe in the fixed channel assignment (FCA).