Broadband satellite networks play an important role in today’s worldwide telecommunication infrastructure, providing services to an increasing number of users. Therefore, an efficient management of the spectrum resources is required in order to meet the fast-growing service demand. To this purpose, this paper addresses the optimization of the return carrier frequency plan for a broadband network benefiting from adaptive return channel selection (ARCS). The optimization problem is formulated as a multiobjective instance aiming at minimizing the total bandwidth and the unused throughput by using integer linear programming techniques. So as to capture events in which multiple terminals experience fade simultaneously, the spatial correlation of the attenuation fields has been incorporated in the optimization process. Moreover, physical layer characteristics and a minimum guaranteed throughput per user have been included as optimization constraints. Hence, the final outcome of this paper is a general technique providing an optimized carrier allocation plan, i.e., the number of carriers required to cover a certain area and guarantee a given throughput to each user
