Demand-based radio network planning of cellular mobile communication systems

This paper presents a demand-based engineering method for designing radio networks of cellular mobile communication systems. The proposed procedure is based on a forward-engineering method, the integrated approach to cellular network planning and is facilitated by the application of a new discrete population model for the traffic description, the demand node concept. The use of the concept enables the formulation of the transmitter locating task as a maximal coverage location problem (MCLP), which is well known in economics for modeling and solving facility location problems. For the network optimization task, we introduced the set cover base station positioning algorithm (SCBPA), which is based on a greedy heuristic for solving the MCLP problem. Furthermore, we present the planning tool prototype ICEPT (Integrated Cellular network Planning Tool), which is based on these ideas and show a first result from a real world planning case