On the expansion problem of cellular wireless networks

We deal with the problem of expanding cellular networks in a cost-effective way. We first propose a mathematical model that deals with selecting the location of new radio network controllers (RNCs) and mobile service switching centers (MSCs), selecting their types, expanding the network topology and selecting the link types, while considering call blocking. We also suppose that several classes of service (CoS) are supported by the network. The objective is to minimize the cost of the expansion process. In order to find "good" solutions, we propose a tabu-search algorithm. Numerical results show that the tabu-search algorithm produces solutions close to a proposed lower bound.