Channel assignment and weighted coloring

In cellular telephone networks, sets of radio channels (colors) must be assigned to transmitters (vertices) while avoiding interference. Often, the transmitters are laid out like vertices of a triangular lattice in the plane. We investigated the corresponding weighted coloring problem of assigning sets of colors to vertices of the triangular lattice so that the sets of colors assigned to adjacent vertices are disjoint. We present a hardness result and an efficient algorithm yielding an approximate solution. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.