Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm for frequency assignment problem in satellite communications

Abstract

Satellite communications technology leads to an important improvement in our life and world. The frequency assignment problem (FAP) is a fundamental problem in satellite communication system for providing high-quality transmissions. The whole goal of the FAP in satellite communication system is to minimize co-channel interference between two satellite systems by rearranging frequency assignment. Recently, many metaheuristics, including neural networks and evolutionary algorithms, are proposed for this NP-complete problem. All such algorithms formulate the FAP as a single-objective problem, although it obviously has two objectives and thus essentially is a multiobjective optimization problem. This study explicitly formulates FAP as a multiobjective optimization problem and presents a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) with a problem-specific subproblem-dependent heuristic assignment (SHA), called MOEA/D-SHA, for the multiobjective FAP. Simulation results show that the MOEA/D-SHA outperforms significantly general-purpose MOEA/D, and an off-the-shelf multiobjective algorithm, i.e., NSGA-II. The advantages of the MOEA/D-SHA over the state-of-the-art single-objective approaches are also shown.