Cost and Performance Tradeoff Analysis of Cell Planning Levels

Abstract: In wireless communication systems, optimal placement of base station locations, i.e.,cell planning, has been considered one of major tools for performance improvement.However, the cell planning requires signicant eort for acquiring suitable sites aswell as expensive computer software for nding out optimal locations. While theprice of equipment has dropped rapidly, the cost of cell planing remains similar orbecomes even more costly with increasing complexity of wireless systems.Therefore,the cell planning cost has become a burden to network operators. There is a needto examine cost benet of sophisticated cell planning. In this thesis, we investigate the tradeo between cost and performance of dierentcell planning levels. We assume that the regular hexagonal cell strucuture representsthe optimal cell planning, and model cell planning levels by means of randomnessin two-dimensional point processes. We also introduce a simple cost model whichtakes into account non-linear increase in total cost with dierent cell planning levels.Numerical results are obtained from Monte Carlo simulations. It is observed thatthe cost benet of cell planning depends on the pace of the cost increase. When fastincrease in the cost against better cell planning is assumed, we can nd a regionwhere lower level of cell planning is more cost-eective. This thesis provides a toolfor decision making that operators can utilize. More realistic simulations and costmodels remain as further study.