Network planning for distributed antenna-based high-speed railway mobile communications

Network planning in wireless communication systems, which has strong impacts on the system performance, is a complex and challenging issue. This paper investigates the network planning problem under high-speed railway communication scenarios. A system model is characterised in terms of distributed antenna technology. An optimisation problem is formulated to optimise the total system cost with transmission rate, handoff time and antenna number constraints. Because the optimisation problem is NP-hard, a particle swarm optimisation (PSO)-based network planning strategy is proposed to tackle it. The complexity analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed PSO-based network planning scheme in terms of running time and memory space. Finally, the simulation results substantiate that the proposed method can consistently offer a better performance gain in comparison with the uniform network planning scheme. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.