A constraint programming approach for the design problem of cellular wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a constraint programming model for the design problem of cellular wireless communication networks. It consists of selecting the location of the base station controllers (BSCs) and mobile service switching centres (MSCs), selecting their types, designing the network topology and selecting the link types, and considering the location of base transceiver stations (BTSs). Next, we propose a heuristic to find a good solution of the model in a reasonable amount of time. This heuristic is a local search combined with constraint programming techniques. Numerical results show that our approach, on average, found better solutions than the best algorithm of the literature.