| This thesis focuses on designing automatic planning tools for the planning problem of 3rd Generation (3G) Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) all-IP Release 4 networks. A new mathematical model for the design problem of such architecture was proposed. The main advantage of the proposed model is to incorporate a realistic traffic profile taken from real live networks. Two approximate algorithms based on the local search and tabu search principles are adopted to solve the problem. Numerical results show that "good" solutions are found with the proposed heuristics. Results demonstrate that the local search algorithm produces solutions that are, on average, at 4.98% of the optimal solution, and in the worst case at 11.31% of the optimal solution. Better solutions are obtained using the tabu search algorithm. Indeed, tabu search is able to provide solutions with an average gap of 2.82% and a maximum gap of 7.51% from the optimal solution. |
