COMPARISON OF OPTIMIZATION STRATEGIES AND ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES FOR RADIO NETWORK PLANNING AND OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS

Abstract

Background. Radio network planning is one of the main phases of the cellular network lifecycle, as it determines capital and operating costs and allows system performance evaluation at any given time. An accurate and comprehensive analysis of existing network statistics is necessary for proper cell planning during network expansion. These statistics are collected throughout the life cycle of the cellular network and usually have certain imperfections (heterogeneity of statistics, which have different densities in different parts of the search space, up to the presence of significant voids, etc.) The system describing the functioning of the radio network can be represented as a black box because its internal processes are too complex to be defined by mathematical functions. This determines the need to use appropriate tools.

Objective. The purpose of the paper is to create a toolkit that allows finding the proper relationships between network parameters to define target values that will help to build an effective network plan in terms of performance and costs for its creation and operation. The tools should be able to work efficiently using the minimum set of available statistical data, as well as taking into account their imperfections.

Methods. Mathematical estimation and optimization methods are used, namely Ordinary Least Squares, Ridge Regression, Lasso, Elastic-net, LARS lasso, Bayesian Ridge Regression, Automatic Relevance Determination, Stochastic gradient descent, Theil-Sen estimator, Huber Regression, Quantile regression, Polynomial regression. We consider 12 estimation methods in combination with two optimization strategies. Additionally, the method of partial analysis of the search space with different number of configurations is considered.

Results. A software package using the Python programming language has been created, which contains a practical implementation of all the considered estimation and optimization methods, as well as tools for evaluating arbitrary configurations of the software package (benchmark) and visualizing the results. The best estimation method is Ordinary Least Squares for finding the optimal configuration of the statistical parameters of the 4G radio network to maximize the download speed. To obtain satisfactory results, it is enough to consider 25 initial and 250 estimated points - a larger number of points will not significantly increase prediction accuracy.

Conclusions. The results indicate the possibility of using the created software package for radio network planning tasks. Further research is aimed at expanding the created software package's functionality and considering additional estimation methods and optimization strategies.

Keywords: radio network planning; radio network optimization; cellular networks; estimation techniques; optimization strategies; big data; 2G; 3G; 4G; CQI; capacity.