Applying Scatter Search to the Location Areas Problem

The Location Areas scheme is one of the most common strategies to solve the location management problem, which corresponds to the management of the mobile network configuration with the objective of minimizing the involved costs. This paper presents a new approach that uses a Scatter Search based algorithm applied to the Location Areas scheme as a cost optimization problem. With this work we pretend to analyze and set the main parameters of scatter search, using four distinct test networks and compare our results with those achieved by other authors. This is a new approach to this problem and the results obtained are very encouraging because they show that the proposed technique outperforms the existing methods in the literature.