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During the past decade, mobile telecommunication technology evolving from 2G、2.5G to 3G has been developed very fast. In order to provide higher convenience and better grade of service quality for mobile users, and to lower operational costs of service providers, mobile communication network planning and design and releated issues have become an important research field. This thesis focuses on Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) network design and location/routing area planning. UMTS provides two modes of wireless service: the first is Circuit Switching (CS) service mode to primarily handle voice calls. In CS mode, some cells are grouped into one service area called Location Area (LA), and the major equipment to provide mobility management function is called Mobile Switching Cenetr (MSC); the second is Packet Switching (PS) service mode to primarily handle packet data transmissiom. In this mode, some cells are grouped into one service area called Routing Area (RA) and the major equipment to manage users’ mobility is called Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN). In this research we determie the coverage area of each LA and each RA and choose the best locations for MSCs and SGSNs. In addition, the best mix of equipment types to be installed at each MSC and SGSN are also decided. A Tabu Search based algorithm is proposed. The algorithm consists of two parts: the first part focuses on the planning of LAs, and then RAs are decided under the existing LAs; after part one a feasible solution will be generated; the second part is to improve the current RAs but ignoring the existing LAs, and then a new solution of LAs is formed under the existing RAs. The algorithm repeats the above two steps until a stopping criterion is satisfied. According to experimental results, the optimization model using CPLEX software is almostly unable to find a feasible solution within ten hours for cases of the number of cells above fifteen. Our algorithm can find better solutions in much less time. Therefore, our algorithm appers to provide valuable alternatives for planner of UMTS network planning and design.
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