Base-station positioning for heterogeneous systems with coverage, capacity and cost criteria

The problem of optimum base station positioning started with the deployment of the first cellular wireless systems, initially with coverage and traffic criteria. Nowadays, the increased demand for geographically inhomogeneous capacity leads to mixed cell structures as well as relay nodes, while the cost of the different deployments varies significantly. The characteristic of heterogeneous systems is that the optimum solution can be a small group of macrocells or a large number of microcells or anything in between. The algorithm presented in this paper has been developed for heterogeneous wireless systems, follows a combinatorial approach and the optimization analysis is based on coverage, capacity and cost criteria. Results demonstrate the flexible performance of the algorithm, as well as the tendency of the solutions towards the deployment of very small cells in order to satisfy the ever increasing capacity requirements.