A Tabu Search Heuristic for the Global Planning of UMTS Networks

In this paper, we propose a tabu search heuristic to find "good" feasible solutions for the global planning problem of universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) networks that is composed of three subproblems: the cell, the access network and the core network planning subproblems. Since this global planning problem has been proven to be NP-hard, we concentrate our efforts on the development of an efficient heuristic. Numerical results show that quasi-optimal solutions (on average, within 0.21% of the optimal solution) can be obtained with the proposed approach