Impact of the multiple access scheme on optimal site positioning

Network planning of modern personal communications systems has been accomplished so far on a manual basis by means of heuristic solutions, but this process is quite time consuming and errors are frequent. Recently, a number of automatic procedures for optimally locating base stations have been developed. In the present paper we try to highlight the influence of the adopted multiple access scheme on the optimal base site locations, and therefore we analyse if and where the deployment of the base stations is eventually influenced. This aspect could be quite interesting in order to compare two existing systems and their flexibility in network optimization; but perhaps it is even more challenging to evaluate how a migration from one system to the other (e.g. from GSM to CDMA) can exploit the present base mesh and thus which difficulties the of the new system has to cope with.