This paper presents a practical approach for planning location areas (LAS) in a personal communication services network (PCSN) considering the hybrid cost and the recurring cost. Given the number of users, penetration factor, average speed of mobile users, number of mobile switching centers (MSCs), call handling capacity of each MSC and handoff cost between adjacent cells, an important consideration in a PCSN design is to identify the cells in every LA to be connected to a particular MSC in a

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... st effective manner. The complete planning of LA, in this work, has been done in two stages. In the first stage, the hybrid cost is optimized. This is done by integrating two techniques, namely estimation of LA boundary (subproblem I), and identification of the cells in an LA (subproblem II). I.