Advanced site configuration techniques for automatic UMTS radio network design

This paper focuses on the optimization of the three most important site configuration parameters in UMTS radio network design: antenna tilt, azimuth angle, and pilot/common channel power. Two optimization techniques are presented. Firstly, a very fast and powerful optimization technique based on a pathloss analysis of the network and the application of heuristics is presented. This method allows for a complete optimization within few minutes even for very large networks of several thousand sites. For fine tuning and a more accurate traffic and load distribution in a second stage a local search optimization is carried out. The proposed methods have been successfully applied to "real world\´* applications. Example results are presented.