The Physical Cell Identity Assignment Problem: A Practical Optimization Approach

The physical cell identity (PCI) is a critical parameter to radio access networks used by the user equipment, like a smartphone, to identify the cell to connect. The PCI misassignment leads to call drops, no voice/data connections, and other sorts of impairments. Many works in the literature only tr...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on evolutionary computation 2024-04, Vol.28 (2), p.282-292
Main Authors: Andrade, Carlos E., Pessoa, Luciana S., Stawiarski, Slawomir
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
5G mobile communication
Algorithms
Handover
Interference
Linear programming
multiobjective optimization
Operations research
Optimization
physical cell identity (PCI)
Production
Programming
Solvers
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The physical cell identity (PCI) is a critical parameter to radio access networks used by the user equipment, like a smartphone, to identify the cell to connect. The PCI misassignment leads to call drops, no voice/data connections, and other sorts of impairments. Many works in the literature only treat the PCI assignment problem from the technological constraints viewpoint. In this work, we take a realistic approach and incorporate several operational constraints found daily in carrier-grade networks. For that, we model the problem with multiple objectives with a strict lexicographical dominance relation. We solve it using a hybrid memetic algorithm with warm start solutions obtained by a constraint programming solver and intensification with path-relinking and custom local search procedures. The experimental results suggest that our approach is superior to commercial solver packages in several scenarios.
ISSN:1089-778X
1941-0026
DOI:10.1109/TEVC.2022.3185927