It is increasingly important to optimally select base stations in the design of cellular networks, as customers demand cheaper and better wireless services. From a set of potential site locations, a subset needs to be selected which optimizes two critical objectives: service coverage and financial cost. As this is an NP-hard optimization problem, heuristic approaches are required for problems of practical size. Our approach consists of two phases which act upon a set of candidate site permutations at each generation. Firstly, a sequential greedy algorithm is designed to commission sites from an ordering of candidate sites, subject to satisfying an alterable constraint. Secondly, an evolutionary optimization technique, which is tested against a randomized approach, is used to search for orderings of candidate sites which optimize multiple objectives. The two-phase strategy is vigorously tested and the results delineated. Keywords Cell planning, base station selection, multiple objecti...
Larry Raisanen, Roger M. Whitaker, Steve Hurley