Capacitated Cell Planning of 4G Cellular Networks
David Amzallag, Roee Engelberg, Danny Raz · 2007
Optimal planning of cellular networks is an important ingredient in the effort to provide advanced cellular services at a reasonable cost. Cell planning includes planning a network of base stations to provide the required coverage of the service area with respect to current and future traffic requirements, available capacities, interference, and the desired QoS. The forthcoming fourth generation (4G) cellular networks are projected to provide a wide variety of new services, including high-quality voice, high-definition video, and high-data-rate wireless channels. Cell planning for these networks requires new approaches, combining appropriate modeling of the technologies dependent characterizations and novel algorithm techniques. In this paper we provide such an approach; we rigourously model important aspects of the 4G networks, define the budget limited cell planning problem and the minimum-cost cell planning problem, and provide the first approximation algorithms for these problems. We then show how the theoretical results can be used to derive practical planning of cellular networks. Our results indicate that a theoretical study together with optimized practical implementations outperform previous commonly used techniques, and achieve a close-to-optimal planning of real cellular networks.