An ant algorithm for cell assignment in PCS networks

Even though significant improvement to communications infrastructure has been attained in the personal communication service industry, the issues concerning the assignment of cells to switches in order to minimize the cabling and handoff costs in a reasonable time remain as challenges and need to be resolved. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based upon the ant colony optimization (ACO) approach to solve this cell assignment problem, which is already known to be NP-hard. ACO is a metaheuristic inspired by the foraging behaviors of ant colonies. We model the cell assignment problem as a form of matching problem in a complete bipartite graph so that our artificial ants can construct their tours on the graph. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ACO algorithm is an effective and promising approach in composing better approximate assignments for the cell assignment problem as compared with some existing heuristics and metaheuristics. The time needed by the ACO algorithm is also practically reasonable.