Fair assignment of base stations in cellular networks

We address the problem of fair assignment of base station locations in a cellular network. We use the generalized α-fairness criterion, which encompasses the different notions of fairness: that of global, proportional, harmonic or max-min fairness in our study. We derive explicit expression for α-fair BS locations under ’large population’ limits in the case of simple 1D models. We show analytically that as α increases asymptotically, the optimal location for a single BS converges to the center of the cell. We validate our analysis via numerical examples. We further study throughput achievable as a function of α-fair BS placement, path-loss factor β and noise variance σ via numerical examples. We also briefly address the problem of optimal placement of two base stations and obtain similar conclusions.