Strategic Location Planning for Broadband Access Networks under Cooperative Transmission

To achieve a cost-effective network deployment, employing state-of-art technical advances provides a practical and effective way to enhance system performance and quality of service provisioning. Cooperative transmission has been recognized as one of the most effective paradigms to achieve higher system performance in terms of lower bit-error rate, higher throughput, larger coverage, more efficient energy utilization, and higher network reliability. This dissertation studies the location planning for the deployment of broadband access networks and explores the great potential of cooperative transmission in the context of single-cell cooperative relaying and multi-cell cooperative transmission, respectively. The placement problem is investigated in two categories of network deployment environment, i.e., an existing wireless access network and a perspective broadband access network, respectively. In an existing wireless access network, to solve some practical problems such as the requirements of capacity enhancement and coverage extension, relay stations (RSs) are introduced in the network architecture. We propose two optimization frameworks with the design objectives of maximizing cell capacity and minimizing number of RSs for deployment, respectively. Mathematical formulations are provided to precisely capture the characteristics of the placement problems. The corresponding solution algorithms are developed to obtain the optimal (or near-optimal) results in polynomial time. Numerical analysis and case studies are conducted to validate the performance benefits due to RS placement and the computation efficiency of the proposed algorithms. To deploy a new metropolitan-area broadband access network, we explore the integration of passive optical network (PON) and wireless cooperative networks (WCN)