An iterative heuristic algorithm for applied channel assignment

Methods for automatically assigning frequencies to base stations in cellular telephone networks have been proposed and studied for decades. Few methods have gone into wide-scale-practice due to factors such as the large size of the practical problems, inadequate problem definitions and under-constrained solutions. GTE has been automatically finding frequency assignments that are used in network-wide retunes, using the results of a radio planning tool called Graphical Radio Network Engineering Tool (GRANET). This paper describes the frequency assignment problem addressed by GRANET, along with the algorithms used to perform the frequency assignments. The paper provides benchmark results from a popular benchmark frequency assignment problem in terms of the frequency reuse number and the carrier-to-interference power ratio.