A coral-reef optimization algorithm for the optimal service distribution problem in mobile radio access networks

Mobile technology is currently one of the main pillars of worldwide economy. The constant evolution that mobile communications have undergone in the last decades, due to the appearance of new services and new technologies such as UMTS/HSPA and LTE, has contributed to achieve this position in global economy. However, due to the crisis of the sector in the last five years, mobile operator’s revenues and investments have been reduced. Thus, mobile network operators tend to exploit the existing infrastructure at maximum possible, trying to use the existing network in the most efficient way. In this paper, a novel bio-inspired algorithm, the coral reef optimization algorithm (CRO) is introduced to minimize a network deployment investment cost problem. This is carried out by means of optimizing the user demand of different services offered by mobile operators over the available technologies in the market, namely the Optimal Service Distribution Problem (OSDP). The CRO is a recently proposed meta-heuristic based on the computer simulation of corals reproduction and reefs’ formation. In this paper, this algorithm has been tested on several OSDP scenarios in Spain, observing a significant reduction (up to 400 Me) on the total investment costs associated to the Radio Access Network deployment. We compare the performance of the CRO approach with that of a classical (experience-based) services distribution, and with alternative meta-heuristics techniques, obtaining good results in all cases. Copyright c ⃝ 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.