On solving the tree-topology design problem for wireless cellular networks

In this paper, we study a wireless cellular network design problem. It consists of selecting the location of the base station controllers and mobile service switching centres, selecting their types, designing the network into a tree-topology, and selecting the link types, while considering the location and the demand of base transceiver stations. We propose a constraint programming model and develop a heuristic combining local search and constraint programming techniques to find very good solutions in a reasonable amount of time for this category of problem. Numerical results show that our approach, on average, improves the results from the literature.