Optimising Channel Assignments for Private Mobile Radio Networks in the UHF 2 Band

Private mobile radio (PMR) services are widely used in business and emergency applications. Typically, these services use the UHF 2 band (450–470 MHz). In order to comply with continental practice, the provision of these services in the UK is to be realigned and a new operational assignment will be generated in 2005. However, this can only be achieved with an appropriate model and the ability to make assignments for large regional networks. The purpose of this paper is to bring our experiences of this problem to the wireless arena. We explain the model used when making assignments for UK PMR networks and identify existing techniques and theory which are appropriate for this problem. We demonstrate that improved assignments and estimates of spectral requirements for large operational services can be found.