Fixed Channel Assignment in Cellular Radio Networks Using Particle Swarm Optimization

The problem of optimal channel assignment has become increasingly important because of available frequency spectrum and increasing demand for cellular communication services. This has been shown to be an NP- complete optimization problem. Many heuristic approaches including neural network, simulated annealing and genetic algorithm have been used to solve it. In this paper we propose a novel and efficient channel assignment approach, particle swarm optimization, to seek a conflict-free channel assignment such that demand is achieved and the EMC constraints are fulfilled, while number of frequency channels is minimized. Simulations on eight well-known benchmark problems showed that the PSO can effectively generate the low-band results.