Power Level Assignment and Base Station Placement Using Simulated Annealing for 4G-LTE Femtocell Networks in Multi-floor Buildings

Abstract

Femtocell Base Stations (FBSs) are widely used to improve data rates and cell coverage to the indoor service in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. With a proper network's design, a network deployment cost will be worth and a network performance will satisfy the users. Nevertheless, with an improper design, besides all of the foregoing will not achieve, an unpleasant problem such as a leakage signal from an indoor to outdoor area will occur. In this paper, we propose an optimization technique which is a collaboration between a Linear Programming (LP) and a Simulated Annealing heuristic technique (SA). We separate our optimization technique into two steps. In step one, we focus on minimizing the number of FBS to be installed by formulating a linear programming problem. In step two, we optimize the placement location and the transmit power level of installed FBS by using the SA heuristic. Our results show that the proposed technique can achieve a better performance trade-off between computation time and solution quality. Besides, when compared to linear programming technique, the proposed technique can reduce the summation of leakage signal up to 90%, the total power usage up to 45% and reduce a computation time more than 70%.