Efficient frequency assignment with simulated annealing

Abstract

Spectrum management is one of the most difficult tasks in communication engineering today, because spectrum must be considered as a limited and therefore very valuable commodity for wireless transmission of information. Nevertheless, it is not very popular to consider spectrum management and especially the frequency assignment problem as an EMC problem. We emphasize the EMC aspects of the frequency assignment problem. The paper concentrates on the channel assignment engine using the stochastic optimization method of simulated annealing. We show how this method works and give some hints for its application on practical frequency assignment problems. Finally, we discuss some differences between exact and heuristic methods.