Automatic Planning and Optimisation of In-building CDMA Systems

by Wong, Joseph

The placement of base stations is an important issue in planning wireless systems because it has a significant influence on overall system performance. In order to achieve good performance in an interference limited CDMA system, a large number of variables must be considered simultaneously during the planning stage. A traditional manual planning approach that involves an iterative application of analysis may not produce satisfactory results since it can only consider a small number of variables simultaneously. This thesis proposes the use of automatic optimisation that allows more variables to be considered and more solutions to be examined within the same time period.

This thesis aims to produce a unique framework for creating an automatic optimisation tool for solving the CDMA base station placement problem. This framework contains a number of mathematical models that describe various deployment scenarios and a number of customised optimisation algorithms that solve these models. Although the work presented in this thesis does not result in a complete design tool, the findings are expected to provide a solid foundation for the development of such a tool. During the course of study, a number of issues associated with the proposed planning approach have been discussed and some future research directions have been identified. The results from the example problems have shown that automatic optimisation has the potential to reduce the planning time significantly, assess system performance accurately and utilise limited resources efficiently. These benefits certainly confirm the need for such a tool and reinforce the importance of the work documented in this thesis.