Evolutionary approach to optimize the assignment of cells to switches in personal communication networks

This paper proposes an evolutionary approach to solve the problem of assigning cells to switches in the planning phase of mobile cellular networks. Well-known in the literature as an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, this problem requires the recourse to heuristic methods, which can practically lead to good feasible solutions, not necessarily optimal, the objective being rather to reduce the convergence time toward these solutions. Computational results obtained from extensive tests confirm the effectiveness of this approach to provide good solutions to problems of a certain size. This approach can be used to solve NP-hard problems, like designing and planning, in the next generation networking systems. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.