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

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.