Radio Link Frequency Assignment

The problem of radio frequency assignment is to provide communication channels from limited spectral resources whilst keeping to a minimum the interference suffered by those whishing to communicate in a given radio communication network. This problem is a combinatorial (NP-hard) optimization problem. In 1993, the CELAR (the French Centre d'Electronique de l'Armement) built a suite of simplified versions of Radio Link Frequency Assignment Problems (RLFAP) starting from data on a real network Roisnel93. Initially designed for assessing the performances of several Constraint Logic Programming languages, these benchmarks have been made available to the public in the framework of the European EUCLID project CALMA (Combinatorial Algorithms for Military Applications). These problems should look very attractive to the CSP community: the problem is simple to represent, all constraints are binary and involve finite domain variables. They nevertheless have some of the flavors of real problems (including large size and several optimization criteria). This paper gives essential facts about the CELAR instances and also introduces the GRAPH instances which were generated during the CALMA project.