Channel assignment in cellular mobile telecommunication systems

A cellular mobile telecommunications system uses base stations distributed throughout a metropolitan area to link mobile customers to the land telephone network. Each base is equipped with enough radios to serve customers within the area (cell) for which it is responsible. A radio channel must be assigned to each radio in the system; the same channel may be assigned to more than one radio when this will not cause undue interference. The channel assignment problem is concerned with assigning channels to the radios of a system without violating a set of interference constraints, using the fewest possible channels. This problem is posed as a graph-coloring problem and as an integer linear program. A graph theoretic model is defined which takes advantage of the cellular structure of the problem.