Metaheuristics and Applications to Optimization Problems in Telecommunications

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed huge advances in computer technology and communication networks, entailing hard optimization problems in areas such as network design and routing. Metaheuristics are general high-level procedures that coordinate sim-ple heuristics and rules to find good approximate solutions to computationally difficult combinatorial optimization problems. Among them, we find simulated annealing, tabu search, GRASP, VNS, genetic algorithms, and others. They are some of the most ef-fective solution strategies for solving optimization problems in practice and have been applied to a very large variety of problems in telecommunications. In this chapter, we review the main components that are common to different metaheuristics. We also de-scribe the main principles associated with several metaheuristics and we give templates for basic implementations of them. Finally, we present an account of some successful applications of metaheuristics to optimization problems in telecommunications.