Global planning of 3G networks using simulated annealing

In this paper, a simulated annealing algorithm is proposed and studied in order to find good feasible solution for the global topology planning problem of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks. The latter has been shown to be NP-hard as it is composed of three different subproblems (each one being NP-hard): the cell planning problem, the access network planning problem and the core network planning problem. As a result, we concentrate our effort on the development of an approximate algorithm based on simulated annealing. Numerical results show that quasi-optimal solutions (on average, within 5.26% of the optimal solution) can be found with a relatively short computation time compared to CPLEX.