Cellular networks planning: A workload balancing perspective

Cell planning has been a long-standing problem since the very starting commercialization of mobile communications, ofwhich power coverage and capacity coverage are twomajor objectives. In this paper, we develop a novel cell planning scheme that is effective and efficient for both the conventional cellular systems and the arising heterogeneous networks, e.g., the long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) one. The key idea of our proposal is that we redesign the service regionsof base stations (BSs) in a traffic-balancedway,makingeachBS serve a subregionof ALMOSTequal throughput requirement. For agivenconnectedpolygonal region tobe servedby a cellular system,we first divide it into compact and connected subregions based on an infinite optimization formulation while keeping the traffic demands of all subregions as equal as possible. Each subregionwill be served by a BS located in it. To avoid yielding ill-shaped subregion that isdifficult tobecoveredbyapractical BS, apenalty term is introduced to theobjective function and it is required that areas of subregions should not differ toomuch fromeachother. Then we select the BS from all candidate sites in each subregion to minimize the total power consumption. By using the proposed dividing and selecting algorithms,we update the boundary of each subregion and the location of each BS in an iterative manner until convergence. Numerical results show that our proposal performs quite well for both randomly generated scenarios and real city environment. The proposed cell planning method provides quality of service (QoS) guaranteed performance with lower capital expenditure and operating expenditure. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.