The facility locations problem for minimizing CDMA hard handoffs

The planning of the fixed part of the PCS network is mainly concerned with minimizing the investment costs of base station controllers (BSC) and PCS exchanges (PCX). Another important aspect which also needs to be considered simultaneously is to minimize the handoffs of CDMA cellular system. This paper describes a detailed mathematical model for planning the fixed network, based on a capacitated hierarchical p-median problem. In this model, me define the adjacency of two PCX areas and develop a simple measure of hard handoffs, which is incorporated into the objective function. As a solution technique for the model, we propose an efficient heuristic using the simulated annealing. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by numerical examples.