ies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Mobile Switching Center (MSC) Growth Increasing Capacity The size of the administrative job of global reassignment favors a simpler solution: treating the new MSC base station assignment as giant-cell splitting. We take the busiest pair of adjacent MSCs and create the new MSC region in between the two re- gions by taking a bite from both of them. In this way, the only base stations reassigned to a different MSC are the base stations being assigned to the new MSC. The other argument for minimizing the base station assignment changes is that the backhaul links have to be rerouted to the new MSC. Even if the MSCs are all in the same place, there is a significant amount of reconfiguration in changing the backhaul link of a base station from one MSC to another. If the MSCs are not all in the same place, and especially if the MSCs are not all on the same transport backbone, then transport cost is a significant factor in the decision of how to assign base stations to MSCs. If we are optimizing backhaul cost for the reassignment of base stations to MSCs, then we should formulate the decision model carefully. If we simply decide to serve each base station where it costs the least, the transition cost of moving the backhaul trans- port from one MSC to another will keep us using the old MSC as much as possible. We can ignore the transition costs, but this also ignores the possibility that changing one base station backhaul link may be much more expensive than changing another. We also can insist that the number of base stations on the MSC be fixed at an appropriate level and look for cost-effective base station swaps. Let us start with a solution that has the desired number of base stations served by the new MSC. We want to consider changes in the new MSC region that keep the same number of cells but reduce the backhaul cost. A simple heuristic that will do a good job is to make incremental changes that reduce cost. We look at the bord