Antenna positioning in mobile telecommunication networks

This paper examines the Antenna Positioning Problem in cellular networks, involving the selection of a subset of antennas from a larger candidate list and the determination of the associated antenna parameters, so as to meet or optimize multiple design criteria. This problem is a critical part of the design process: it constitutes a significant proportion of the network resources involved and it is the first building block of the overall process, hence strongly affecting downstream decisions. The proposed problem formulation attempts to bring together issues raised both in the academic literature and by practitioners, while linking the network infrastructure design phase to the subsequent frequency allocation phase. We propose a tabu search based algorithm with multiple neighbourhood operators to solve this problem. This heuristic is then evaluated on a real life network. Results show a significant improvement over the currently implemented network configurations in the context of green field and network capacity upgrade scenarios.