Global Search Techniques for Problems in Mobile Communications

In the late 70's and the 80's global search techniques such as Genetic Algorithms (GA's), Simulated Annealing (SA), and Tabu Search (TS) were developed. These procedures are all adaptive, iterative, randomized heuristic searches that are guaranteed to locate the global optimum even in NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. At about the same time, mobile radio communication systems (such as AMPS and GSM) also began to gain importance. It has only been the last four years or so that these global search techniques have been utilized as tools in solving some of the complex optimization problems that arise in the eld of mobile communications. There are still very few papers in the literature dealing with the application of GA, SA and TS to mobile communications; even among these an extraordinary majority are concerned with one speciic problem-the channel allocation problem in cellular systems. This chapter is intended to be a survey of this early literature, demonstrating the unrealized potential for the use of these techniques in several areas in mobile communications. The twin goals of this chapter are a) to familiarize mobile communication engineers with these techniques and b) to provide those interested in these techniques with an idea of their possible applications to mobile communications. The chapter will review recent papers concerning the application of global search techniques to the following problems in the area of mobile communications: Optimal topological design of the xed part of a cellular network 1]. The channel assignment problem (CAP) in cellular wireless systems 2]-7].