A Hybrid Scatter Search algorithm to assign terminals to concentrators

The last few years have seen a significant growth in communication networks. With the growth of data traffic, network operators seek network-engineering tools to extract the maximum benefits out of the existing infrastructure. This has suggested a number of new optimisation problems, most of them in the field of combinatorial optimisation. We address here the Terminal Assignment problem. The main objective is to assign a collection of terminals to a collection of concentrators. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Scatter Search (HSS) algorithm to assign terminals to concentrators. Coupled with the Scatter Search algorithm we use a Tabu Search algorithm to locate the global minimum. We show that HSS is able to achieve feasible solutions to Terminal Assignment instances, improving the results obtained by previous approaches.