A Practical Approach for Location Area Planning in a Personal Communication Services Network

Abstract

This paper presents a practical approach for planning location areas (LAs) in a personal communication services network (PCSN). Given the number of users, penetration factor, average speed of a usa:, number of mobile switching centers (MSCs), call handling capacity of each MSC and handoff cost between adjacent cells, an important consideration in a PCSN design is to identify the cells in every LA to be connected to a particular MSC in a cost effective manna:. The complete planning of LA, in this work, has been done by integrating two techniques, namely estimation of LA boundary (subproblem I), and identification of the cells in an LA (subproblem II). The subproblem I is formulated as single variable optimization problem which is solved using Lagrangean Relaxation Method (LRM), combined with an efficient Subgradient Heuristic Algorithm (SHA), to find out an approximate value of the perimeter of an LA. Using this approximate value, in subproblem II, we find out the actual dimension of an LA by assigning cells to switches while optimizing the total cost which comprises the handoff plus cable cost (i.e., cost of cabling from the site of base station to its associated MSC). The results show that this division of the problem into two subproblems, each of which can be solved heuristically, gives a less complex way to good results of the optimization than the other solutions.