A smart technique for determining base-station locations in an urban environment

With the increasing demand for cheaper and better wireless communication services from customers, and the tendency to move toward smaller cell sizes, it is becoming very important to optimally design the cell geometry and deploy the minimum number of base stations to provide maximum possible coverage. We consider how to optimally determine the locations for the placement of base stations for a wireless system in an urban setting, given the cell coverage. An algorithm is presented that determines the optimal locations of the base stations without performing an exhaustive search. Using this algorithm, a 20-25% decrease in the number of base stations required has been observed for simulated environments. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is also discussed.