Planning Future Cellular Networks: A Generic Framework for Performance Quantification

The new pressing expectations from emerging cellular systems such as energy efficiency, heterogeneity of cell sizes and base station types, focus shift to capacity from coverage, and demand for homogeneity of service provided in the coverage area, have increased the need for intelligent and optimal cellular system planning more than ever. While large number of works in literature have focused on various aspects of cell planning for legacy and emerging cellular systems, a common strategy to take into account these new born requirements by formulating them as function of underlying planning parameters, is missing so far, making the research on planning next generation cellular system sporadic. In this paper we address this problem and present a novel framework that can facilitate holistic planning of future cellular system by embodying these requirements through a unified and interrelated set of metrics to reflect the key performance indicators. These metrics can be used to quantify performance of cellular system plan in terms of major deployment parameters of interest. We use an extensive set of numerical results to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed framework. These results also provide useful insights into the key trade offs involved in planning of emerging cellular networks and thus can facilitate future research in this area.