A simple heuristic for assignment of cells to switches in a PCS network

This work deals with a design problem for a network of Personal Communication Services (PCS). The goal is to assign cells to switches in a PCS Network (PCSN) in an optimum manner so as to minimize the total cost which includes two types of cost, namely handoff cost between two adjacent cells, and cable cost between cells and switches. The design is to be optimized subject to the constraint that the call volume of each switch must not exceed its call handling capacity. In the literature, this problem has been conventionally formulated as an integer programming problem. However, because of the time complexity of the problem, the solution procedures are usually heuristic when the number of cells and switches are more. In this paper, we have proposed an assignment heuristic which is faster and much simpler than the existing algorithms. Despite its simplicity, experimental results show that it performs equally well in terms of solution quality, and, at the same time, it is faster than its predecessors. We present the algorithm as well as comparative results to justify our claim.