Assignment of cells to switches in a cellular mobile network using a hybrid Hopfield network-genetic algorithm approach

Handoff and cabling cost management plays a key role in the design of cellular telecommunications networks. The efficient assignment of cells to switches in this type of networks is an NP-complete problem which cannot be solved efficiently unless P = NP. This paper presents a hybrid Hopfield network-genetic algorithm approach to the cell-to-switches assignment problem, in which a Hopfield network manages the problem’s constraints, and a genetic algorithm searches for high quality solutions with the minimum possible cost in terms of handoff and cable displayed. We show, by means of computational experiments, the good performance of our approach to this problem. # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.