Multi-period channel assignment

The well-known fixed channel assignment scheme for cellular networks is not flexible enough to follow the evolution of traffic. This paper introduces a multi-period channel assignment model. In addition to the usual objective of minimizing the interference, the model integrates another requirement to minimize the transition cost from a frequency plan to another one. Several heuristic solution approaches are also proposed. Experimental results on real data are presented to compare the multi-period model and the fixed model, and to assess the effectiveness of the proposed solution algorithms.