Propagation-Model-Free Base Station Deployment for Mobile Networks: Integrating Machine Learning and Heuristic Methods

As densification is the promising trend of future mobile networks, deployment of base stations (BSs) becomes increasingly difficult due to the laborious procedures in network planning; besides, unreasonable layout may lead to poor coverage performance. Hence, this paper firstly trains a propagation-model-free received signal strength (RSS) predictor based on machine learning (ML) models, and then optimizes coverage performance of BS deployment via multi-objective heuristic methods. Specifically, many practical features that affect signal propagation like geographical types and operating parameters of BS, are fed into ML models to predict RSS in a rasterized area; then based on the trained model, a well-designed multi-objective genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to minimize the number of deployed BSs with coverage constraint. For the practical considerations of fast convergence and output-consistence, greedy algorithm with fixed initial solution and searching direction is also carried out. Moreover, the typical scenarios of incremental deployment (the mobile operator needs to deploy more BSs on the basis of the existing deployment) and BS outage compensation (one BS fails and other BSs need to adjust their configurations to fill the coverage gap), are also investigated for practical needs. Simulations show that multi-layer perceptron outperforms other ML algorithms in terms of RSS prediction with mean absolute error (MAE) yielded to 3.78 dB; and numerical results verify the convergence and availability of the proposed algorithms, which shows 18.5% gain than the real-world deployment in terms of coverage rate.