Optimization of base stations positioning in mobile networks

Abstract

Cell planning is a very complex task because many aspects should be taken into account including the traffic distribution, geography, antenna height of base stations, frequency, and so forth. This becomes more complicated when several constraints are considered such as the quality of service, maximum output power of transmitters, types of power control, and other network requirements. The problems are assignment of mobile stations to the appropriate base station and finding good locations of the base stations. This paper presents a constraint satisfaction problem model for base station location in 3G W-CDMA uplink environments. This is similar to a warehouse location problem, so it is NP-hard and consequently cannot be practically solved by exact methods for real size networks. Thus we apply constraint satisfaction techniques such as variable ordering and value ordering to get good approximate solutions. The algorithm has been implemented by using both integer programming and constraint programming. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.