A tabu search approach for assigning cells to switches in cellular mobile networks

  • Authors:

  • Samuel Pierre;Fabien HouéTo

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Engineering, Mobile Computing and Networking Research Laboratory (LARIM), ícole Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, Qué., ...;Department of Computer Engineering, Mobile Computing and Networking Research Laboratory (LARIM), ícole Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, Qué., ...

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This paper proposes a tabu search approach for assigning cells to switches in wireless cellular networks. This problem is NP-hard and consequently cannot be practically solved by exact methods for real size networks. We first establish a new mathematical equivalence between the assignment problem and the well-known p-fixed hub location problem. From this equivalence as a basis for a heuristic method, initial solutions have been generated. Then, some flexible and powerful moves, a gain structure and its update procedures are defined and used to improve these initial solutions and generate near optimal final solutions. To evaluate the performance of this approach, we define two lower bounds for the global optimum, which are used as reference to assess the quality of the obtained solutions. Computational experiments show that our approach generally provides better results than those generated by other traditional heuristics found in the literature, especially for large-scale networks with more than 50 cells and 3 switches.