DAB Ensemble Planning – Problems and Techniques

The paper is about the planning of ensembles and block assignments for DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) networks. Besides offering superior audio quality and multimedia data services, DAB has the potential to use the available frequency resources much more efficiently than other (analog or digital) audio broadcast systems, since it has the capability to transmit an ensemble of radio programs and data services over large regions using just a single frequency. However, to fully exploit this feature new planning methods are needed. The paper discusses a possible solution approach which leads to a combined bin packing/graph coloring problem. It is shown how this problem can be solved using heuristics, how to obtain lower bounds to estimate the quality of computed solutions, and which generalizations of the problem statement arise in practical planning scenarios. The same methods also apply to other digital broadcast systems based on similar technology like, e.g., digital video broadcasting (DVB-T).