An optimization metric for air-to-ground network planning

This paper presents a metric that achieves good results in optimizing the placement, power, and orientation of CDMA2000 1xEV-DO base stations that provide wireless air-to-ground (ATG) communications to commercial and general aviation aircraft. A network optimized using simulated annealing (SA) and the aforementioned metric is compared against one done by hand and traditional network planning methods. Results on a realistic network show that gains of 65% in the median user experience are possible through optimization around this metric.