Integrating Tabu Search in Particle Swarm Optimization for the Frequency Assignment Problem

In this paper, we address one of the issues in the frequency assignment problem for cellular mobile networks in which we intend to minimize the interference levels when assigning frequencies from a limited frequency spectrum. In order to satisfy the increasing demand in such cellular mobile networks, we use a hybrid approach consisting of a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) combined with a Tabu Search (TS) algorithm. This approach takes both advantages of PSO efficiency in global optimization and TS in avoiding the premature convergence that would lead PSO to stagnate in a local minimum. Moreover, we propose a new efficient, simple, and inexpensive model for storing and evaluating solution's assignment. The purpose of this model reduces the solution's storage volume as well as the computations required to evaluate these solutions in comparison with the classical model. Our simulation results on the most known benchmarking instances prove the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in comparison with previous related works in terms of convergence rate, the number of iterations, the solution storage volume and the running time required to converge to the optimal solution.