A fundamental problem in third-generation mobile systems is the adaptation of the channel allocation to the traffic volume variation. Traffic adaptation may be partly achieved by the following (aggregate channel allocation) problem: given the set of channels, the cell structure and the load to be accommodated in each cell within a certain time zone, find the optimal allocation of channels to cells subject to the restrictions arising from the minimum permissible distance of cells where the same channel can be used at the same time. In this paper the problem is optimally formulated and efficiently solved by a heuristic. In the sequel the performance of a combined channel management scheme that uses the above problem for handling major traffic variations and a distributed DCA scheme for handling local traffic variations is assessed. Finally, results are presented and some concluding remarks are made. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.