Integrated Interswitch Cable and Handoff Cost Minimizing Heuristics for Cell-to-Switch Assignment in Wireless Cellular Networks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on vehicular technology 2009-11, Vol.58 (9), p.5074-5082
• Main Authors: Maitra, M., Mukherjee, A., Saha, D.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Cables; Call dwell time; call volume; cell-to-switch assignment (CSA); Cellular; Cellular communication; Circuit properties; Connection and protection apparatus; Cost engineering; Cost function; Electric, optical and optoelectronic circuits; Electrical engineering. Electrical power engineering; Electronic circuits; Electronics; Equipments and installations; Exact sciences and technology; Frequency; handoff; handoff request generated; Heuristic; incoming traffic; Land mobile radio cellular systems; Load balancing; Load balancing (computing); Load management; Mesh networks; Mobile radiocommunication systems; NP-hard problem; Radiocommunications; Searching; Stochastic processes; Studies; Switches; Switching, multiplexing, switched capacity circuits; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Telecommunication traffic; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Telephony; Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments)
• ISSN: 0018-9545; 1939-9359
• DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2009.2028072

Cell-to-switch assignment (CSA) is a well-known NP-hard problem for location management in a wireless cellular network (WCN). In this paper, we focus on the probabilistic CSA problem, where interswitch handoffs, call arrivals, and call dwell times are considered stochastic with certain distributions, and propose two heuristic approaches to solve the problem. We present an analytical framework to derive interswitch handoff frequencies among the cells. The first heuristic does not consider the load-balancing issue, whereas the second heuristic considers the load balancing among the different switches while assigning cells to them. We compare our heuristics with taboo search (TS) and find that they significantly outperform the metaheuristic TS. After minimizing the objective function comprising amortized cable and variable interswitch handoff costs, our heuristics attain a minimum that is very close to the theoretical lower bound. The merit of our heuristics lies in the fact that those can be deployed online and can provide an adaptive solution to the design problem.