Frequency Assignment for JALN HCB

Joint Aerial Layered Network (JALN) could provide crucial communication links when milsatcoms are degraded or lost. Antenna assignment problem for JALN High Capacity Backbone (HCB) has been studied in [1], [2] where each JALN aircraft has four mounting points for directional antennas. Another resource allocation problem arising is that how we can efficiently assign the frequencies to JALN HCB. Two-way traffic through a link is assigned to two disjoint frequency bands. Frequency Division Multiplexing Access (FDMA) is used to share bandwidth and avoid the interference among multiple transceivers on a single aerial platform. Two Frequency Assignment Problems (FAP) are considered in this work, which are called MMC-FAP and MS-FAP. MMC-FAP is to Minimize the frequency usage of the Most Congested aerial platform while accommodating the offered traffic demands and without violating the frequency constraints. MS-FAP is to Minimize the frequency Span in both frequency bands. By exploiting problem-specific properties, MMC-FAP can be formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem, which has a tight constraint space by explicitly finding all maximal cliques in the conflict graph. Then, binary search strategy is used to find an optimal solution of MS-FAP problem while MMC-FAP occurs as a sub-problem. Numerical experiments are used to show the performance of the proposed approach.