Base station positioning in third generation mobile networks

This paper presents an optimization model for base station location in 3G UMTS downlink environment. The model concerns optimization of the base station parameters such as base station location, transmitted power and antenna height, all of which can be individually assigned to each base station. All these choices must satisfy a set of constraints and optimize a set of objectives. This problem is NP-hard and consequently cannot be practically solved by exact methods for real size networks. Thus, we apply heuristic and stochastic optimization techniques for tackling this complex and highly combinatorial problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the methods, an extensive experimental analysis is presented.