An efficient heuristic algorithm for channel assignment problem in cellular radio networks

This paper presents an efficient heuristic algorithm for the channel assignment problem in cellular radio networks. The task is to find channel assignment with minimum frequency bandwidth necessary to satisfy given demands from different nodes in a cellular network. At the same time the interference among calls within the same cell and from different neighboring cells are to be avoided, where interference is specified as the minimum frequency distance to be maintained between channels assigned to a pair of nodes. The simplest version of this problem, where only cochannel interferences are considered, is NP-complete. The proposed algorithm could generate a population of random valid solutions of the problem very fast. The best among them is the optimum or very near to optimum solution. For all problems with known optimal solutions, the algorithm could find them. A statistical estimation of the performance of the proposed algorithm is done. Comparison with other methods show that our algorithm works better than the algorithms that we have investigated