An Efficient Geometry-Induced Genetic Algorithm for Base Station Placement in Cellular Networks

During the phase of the Base Station (BS) deployment, the BS placement, as an essential issue in achieving seamless coverage of the existing, even the future version of cellular networks, should be attached extensive attention. The ignorance of the geometric distribution of the candidate sites results in negative impact on the performance of traditional meta-heuristic algorithms related to the base station placement problem. A novel geometry-induced genetic algorithm is proposed as an efficient solution to the problem based on both the local coverage evaluation and the local geometric site pattern reservation. The deployment region is divided into sub-regions and the site assignment in the sub-regions is encoded to geometry-aware chromosome segment, which reflects the geometric correlation among the BSs. In the crossover operation, the segments of the chromosomes, while representing the sites inside a sub-region, are exchanged as a whole. In the mutation operation, the overall coverage performance witnesses improvement with the gradual decoration of the poor sub-regions. The experiments for both the ideal disk coverage model and the real radio signal coverage model are executed. The results prove the validity and the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.