Automatic planning of 3G UMTS all-IP release 4 networks with realistic traffic

摘要

Most Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) service providers are switching to an all-IP (also called flat-IP) architecture. Using an all-IP architecture within 3G networks provides a cost-effective transport network since the same infrastructure can be used for both voice and data services. However, planning and designing such an architecture is very complex especially if realistic traffic profiles are taken into consideration. As a result, this paper first provides a mathematical formulation (presented in Appendix for readability reasons) for the global planning problem of 3G UMTS all-IP Release 4 networks with realistic traffic profile. Due to the complexity of the problem, heuristics based on local search and tabu search are also proposed. Finally, a comparative study is performed to evaluate how good the heuristics are with respect to a reference model. Results show that the tabu search is able to provide solutions that are close to optimal solutions in a much shorter computation time.