Uplink UMTS network design—an integrated approach

In this paper, we first propose a global approach for planning universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) networks in the uplink direction. Instead of partitioning the planning problem into several subproblems and solving them successively (sequential approach), we propose a mathematical programming model that addresses it as a whole. This global approach has the advantage of providing better results since, in general, optimal solutions to all subproblems do not provide an optimal solution to the global problem. In order to prove our point, we present a detailed example that compares the global and the sequential approaches. Next, we propose a local search heuristic to find “good” feasible solutions of the global model within a reasonable amount of time. Finally, numerical results for a set of randomly generated problems are presented. The results show that the heuristic produces solutions that are, on average, at 6.53% of the optimal solution, and in the worst case at 31.31% of the optimal solution.