A Genetic Algorithmic Approach to Planning IEEE 802.16 Networks

IEEE 802.16, also known as WiMAX (Worldwide Inter-operability for Microwave Access), is a new wireless access technology for current increasing demand of wireless high-speed broadband service. Efficient and effective deployment of such a network to service an area of users with certain traffic demands is an important network planning problem. This network planning can be formulated in a similar way as the unsplittable capacitated facility location problem. Different from traditional p-median or splittable capacitated facility location models, which are already known to be NP-complete to obtain exact solutions, the unsplittable capacitated facility location problem is even harder. In addition, the limited communication range adds another layer of complexity. In this work, we resort to a Genetic Algorithm (GA) in order to yield good approximation solutions. Experiments show that our approach is fairly effective and robust to different scenarios of the network planning problem.