Systems and methods for intelligently assigning a channel to a device being used by a mobile user in a power controlled, wireless communications system by minimizing the difference between a mobile user's received signal power and the minimum received signal power of a current user on a candidate carrier frequency. Each carrier frequency within a cell is examined to determine whether it has at least one current user assigned to a channel and also has at least one unoccupied channel. For each carrier frequency that meets both of these requirements, a channel quality metric is obtained for each occupied channel. The carrier frequencies are pruned down to a subset of candidate carrier frequencies using the channel quality metrics. Finally, a channel within the set of candidate carrier frequencies is selected by computing a cost function based on the received signal power of the mobile user and the received signal power of each occupied channel.