Registration area planning for PCS networks using genetic algorithms

In a personal communication service (PCS) network, the signaling traffic required to support user mobility is extremely high due to the huge numbers of users and the small sizes of cells. The requirement to minimize this traffic increases the importance of registration area (RA) planning in the PCS network design. In the literature, several heuristic algorithms have been proposed for RA planning, however, they may get trapped into local minima and may lack robustness. In this paper, we reformulate the problem of RA planning as a cost-optimization problem and propose genetic algorithms for RA planning in PCS networks. Simulation results show that genetic algorithms are robust for RA planning.