Green Communications: Principles, Concepts and Practice

Chapter 6Energy-Efficient Mobile Network Design and Planning

Yinan Qi, Muhammad Ali Imran and Rahim Tafazolli

Institute for Communication Systems (ICS), University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK

6.1 Introduction

The exponential increase of user data often requires planning and design of a data communication system and the operation and management of such a system. The latter issues are discussed in the next several chapters and this chapter mainly deals with planning and design of a wireless network. Network design and planning consists of three steps: network topology design, network synthesis and network realization [1–3]. In the first step, the locations and connecting patterns of the network nodes are determined. In the second step, the network parameters, such as size, are optimized subject to certain quality of service (QoS) requirements. In the last step, the network is realized with designed configuration parameters. These steps might be conducted in an iterative manner to gradually optimize the network. For a wireless network, network design and planning principles can be applied to both the core network and the radio access network (RAN). The main focus of this chapter is on the RAN. In the development of today's second and third generation cellular mobile radio networks, such as GSM and WCDMA, the main optimization objectives in network design and planning are focused on providing optimum throughput subject to coverage requirements and a required level of QoS. ...