Two Distributed Algorithms for the Frequency Assignment Problem in the Field of Radio Broadcasting

The frequency assignment problem involves the assignment of discrete frequencies to the transmitters of a radio network, such as a radio broadcasting network. Frequency separation is necessary to avoid interference by other transmitters to the signal received from the wanted transmitter at the reception region. Here, it is of major importance to minimize the interference while at the same time using the spectrum efficiently. In this paper we present two original distributed algorithms implemented on clusters of PCs used to solve the frequency assignment problem in the field of radio broadcasting. The first one is based on the island distributed implementation of our hybrid genetic algorithm. The second one uses a distributed cooperative Tabu Search. Experimental results show that our algorithms, applied to several instances given by TDF-C2R, lead to important time performance improvements.