The Broadcaster-Repacking Problem
William K. Schwartz

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the computational complexity of the FCC's broadcaster-repacking problem, demonstrating its NP-completeness, and explores heuristics and algorithms for efficient solutions using existing software tools.
Contribution
It proves the NP-completeness of the broadcaster-repacking problem and connects existing heuristics to satisfiability and integer programming frameworks.
Findings
The problem is NP-complete.
Heuristics can be related to satisfiability and integer programming.
Algorithms using off-the-shelf software can effectively solve the problem.
Abstract
The Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) ongoing Incentive Auction will, if successful, transfer billions of dollars of radio spectrum from television broadcasters to mobile-network operators. Hundreds of broadcasters may go off the air. Most of those remaining on the air, including hundreds of Canadian broadcasters not bidding, will have to move to new channels to continue broadcasting. The auction can only end if all these broadcasters will fit into the spectrum remaining for television. Whether a given set of broadcasters fits is the broadcaster-repacking problem. The FCC must calculate its solutions thousands of times per round of bidding. Speed is essential. By reducing the broadcaster-repacking problem to the maximum independent set problem, we show that the former is -complete. This reduction also allows us to expand on sparsity-exploiting heuristics in the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsQR Code Applications and Technologies · graph theory and CDMA systems · Algorithms and Data Compression
