Autonomous self-deployment of wireless access networks

The deployment and configuration of wireless access networks represent an increasingly significant cost factor which will force the telecommunications industry to adopt new methodologies for network deployment and configuration. In this paper an extreme option is investigated: a self-deploying network, which is able to autonomously identify the need for changes in position and configuration of wireless access nodes and which can adapt to its environment without human interaction. The self-deployment problem is presented and the impracticalities of a globally optimal solution are discussed. Practical distributed algorithms for self-deployment and load balancing are derived that allow robust and efficient deployment of wireless access networks with a minimum of overhead communication between nodes. It is shown that self-deploying networks using the proposed algorithms are able to significantly outperform statically deployed networks in environments with dynamic user demand and provide robustness against failing nodes. In addition, it is shown that the proposed algorithms are not very sensitive to location estimate errors.