Fast Wide Area Network Design Optimisation Using Differential Evolution

The Radio Network Design (RND) problem for wide area networks consists of determining the optimal locations for base station transmitters in order to get a maximum coverage area with a minimum number of transmitters. Because of the grand amount of possible solutions, this problem is most suitable to be tackled with bio-inspired techniques instead of classical approaches. Our recent research work exploited a differential evolution based algorithm to deal with this problem. This paper describes an enhanced implementation of our Differential Evolution-based algorithm that is able to tackle the RND problem in a most effective and faster way that the one observed in our previous work. This approach includes the comparison of different operators and the usage of an alternate initialisation model.