A takeover time-driven adaptive evolutionary algorithm for mobile user tracking in pre-5G cellular networks

Cellular networks are one of today’s most popular means of communication. This fact has made the mobile phone industry subject to a huge scientific and economic competition, where the quality of service is key. Such a quality is measured on the basis of reliability, speed and accuracy when delivering a service to a user no matter his location or behaviour are. This fact has placed the users’ tracking process among the most difficult and determining issues in cellular network design. In this paper, we present an adaptive bi-phased evolutionary algorithm based on the takeover time to solve this problem. The proposal is thoroughly assessed by tackling twenty-five real-world instances of different sizes. Twenty-eight of the state-of-the-art techniques devised to address the users’ mobility problem have been taken as the comparison basis, and several statistical tests have been also conducted. Experiments have demonstrated that our solver outperforms most of the top-ranked algorithms.This research is partially funded by the Universidad de Málaga, Consejería de Economía y Conocimiento de la Junta de Andalucía and FEDER under grant number UMA18-FEDERJA-003 (PRECOG); MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 under grant number PID 2020-116727RB-I00 (HUmove) and under TAILOR ICT-48 Network (No952215) funded by EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Funding for open access charge is supported by the Universidad de Málaga/CBUA. The views expressed are purely those of the writer and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. We also acknowledge that some instances studied in our work were previously inspired from the CRAWDAD dataset spitz/cellular. The authors would like also to address special thanks to Mrs Malika Belaifa and Mrs Zeineb Dahi for their help in creating the realistic problem benchmarks