An investigation on metaheuristic techniques for solving cell to switch assignment problem

The assignment of cells to switches in a Personal Communication Services Network (PCSN) is a Non-Deterministic Polynomial Time (NP) hard problem with exponential complexity and is among the hardest combinatorial optimisation problems of great practical importance in wireless communication systems. The objective is to assign cells to switches in an optimal manner, such that the cost comprising the sum of hand-off, cabling and switching cost is minimised with reasonable accuracy in an acceptable time scale, while obeying the constraints that each cell must be assigned to exactly one switch and total load of all the cells which are assigned to a switch is below the capacity of the switch. The aim of this article is to experimentally investigate the performance of three recent metaheuristic algorithms namely Bat Algorithm (BA), Firefly Algorithm (FA) and Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) for solving the Cell to Switch Assignment (CSA) problem.