Solving a Real-World FAP Using the Scatter Search Metaheuristic

Frequency planning is a very important task in the design and operation of current GSM networks. For this reason, the frequency assignment problem (FAP) is a well-known problem in the Operations Research which includes different mathematical models depending on the specific conditions of the application which is being designed. However, most of these models are not close from considering current technologies aspects which are deployed in GSM networks. In this work, we use a formulation of FAP, developed in published work, which focuses on aspects which are used in real-word GSM networks. We focus on solving this problem for a realistic-sized, real-world GSM network, using the Scatter Search algorithm. We have analyzed and fixed the SS algorithm to the FAP problem and, after a detailed statistical study, the obtained results prove that this approach can compute accurate frequency plans for real-world instances in an optimum way. In fact, our results surpass all the results previously published in the literature.