Asymptotic Minimum Coverage Using Macroscopic Diversity

The optimal geometric configuration of the cells of a wireless network using multiple antennas for each base station and a macrodiversity technique is investigated. The simplest model of a cell of an existing wireless network is disk shaped, and the cell deployment is arranged in a honeycomb tiling pattern. This model has been used as the first-order approximation for designing and evaluating wireless networks. However, the cells of a network using multiple antennas and macrodiversity are no longer disk shaped. This study investigated a network with a cell-and-antenna deployment pattern that covers a given service area using the minimum number of cells. The objective of this paper is to offer a first-order approximation model for a cell-and-antenna deployment pattern of such a network. For this objective, first, by imposing practical conditions, cell-and-antenna deployment patterns are classified. Then, the asymptotic minimum coverage problem is formulated as an optimization problem with a constraint for a set of deployment patterns. To easily obtain the first-order approximation model, a simplified formulation and model are proposed. Numerical examples show that the proposed deployment pattern covers the service area with nearly half the cells required by the existing heuristic pattern.