CALB: a new cell-to-switch assignment algorithm with load balancing in the design of a personal communication services network (PCSN)

The work deals with the problem of balancing traffic (load) amongst mobile switching centers (MSC) when the cluster of cells to be connected to an MSC is decided during the design of a personal communication services network (PCSN). Our aim is to assign cells to MSC in such a manner that the traffic handling capacity of each of the MSC is utilized uniformly, thereby precluding the possibility of unfairness in loading of MSC. This, in turn, makes all the MSC equally scalable against the increase in either the mobile user density or per user traffic. A conventional cell to switch assignment (CSA) algorithm attempts to optimize only the total cost, comprising cable cost and handoff cost, without taking into account the utilization of the traffic handling capacity of MSC. To obviate this limitation, we propose a new CSA algorithm with load balancing (CALB) which emphasizes equally on the load balancing as well as on cost optimization. CALB performs extremely well in balancing the traffic amongst the MSC present in the network thereby helping in increasing the overall scalability. although it outperforms CSA in terms of load balancing, it does so obviously at increased total cost (i.e., the solution obtained is a sub-optimal one in terms of cost only). But the increase in cost is never overwhelming (5%-14%) vis-a-vis the improvement in the system scalability (0.5%-19%).