A hybrid swarm intelligence approach to the registration area planning problem

• There are several important problems in the domain of cellular wireless networks.
• Registration area planning (RAP) is one such problem.
• A hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm has been proposed for RAP problem.
• Proposed approach has been compared against other state-of-the-art approaches.
• Computational results show the superiority of the proposed approach.

Proper management of locations of the mobile devices is of great importance in this era of wireless communication networks, as the use of the mobile devices has grown exponentially. The registration area planning (RAP) problem aims to group the wireless network cells into contiguous areas called registration areas in order to minimize the cost of managing the location of mobile devices. Since the RAP problem is a grouping problem, therefore, a grouping-based artificial bee colony algorithm coupled with a local search is developed for this problem. An artificial bee colony algorithm is a recently developed swarm intelligence technique based on the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bee swarm. We have compared the proposed approach with the state-of-the-art approaches available in the literature. Computational results clearly show the superiority of the proposed approach in comparison to these approaches in terms of both the solution quality and the running time.