Solving the reporting cells problem using a scatter search based algorithm

The Location Management problem is an important issue of mobility management, which is responsible for determining the network configuration, with the major goal of minimizing the involved costs. One of the most common strategies of location management is the Reporting Cells (RC) scheme, which mainly considers the location update and the paging costs. In this paper we propose a Scatter Search (SS) based approach applied to the Reporting Cells as a cost optimizing solution, with the objective of achieving the best network configuration defining a subset of cells as reporting cells and the others as nonreporting cells. With this work we want to define the most adequate values of the SS parameters, when applied to the RC problem, using twelve test networks that represent 4 distinct groups divided by size. We also want to compare the performance of this SS based approach with a previous study based on Differential Evolution and also with other approaches presented in the literature. The results obtained are very interesting because they outperform those obtained with other approaches exposed in the literature.