Designing Cellular Mobile Networks Using Non{Deterministic Iterative Heuristics

Abstract

Abstract Network planning in the highly competitive, demand-adaptive and rapidly growing cellular telecommunications industry is a fairly complex and crucial issue. It comprises collective optimization of the supporting, switching, signaling and interconnection networks to minimize costs while observing imposed infrastructure constraints. This work focuses on the problem of assigning cells to switches, which comprise the Base Station Controller and Mobile Switching Center, in a cellular mobile network. As a classic instance of the NP-hard Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), deterministic algorithms are incapable of nding optimal solutions in the vast complex search space in polynomial time. Hence, a randomized, heuristic algorithm, such as Simulated Evolution is used in this work to optimize the transmission costs in cellular networks. The results achieved are compared with existing methods available in literature. Key words: Network planning, Cellular Mobile Network, Assignment, Quadratic Assignment Problem, Heuristics, Evolutionary Heuristics, Soft Computing.