Design team members: Erik Kalviainen, Conor Mlacak, Derek Snider
Supervisor: Kumaraswamy Ponnambalam
Background
There are many practical issues of economic, physical, and societal importance concerning cellular network design. Some of the most important of such factors are summarized below:
- there isn't an infinite amount of bandwidth available
- the number of cell phone users is continuing to grow
- the amount of money that communication companies have for developing their communication network is budget limited
- there exist technical limitations in the transmittal of radio signal due to path loss, and the introduction of signal interference
- consumers have a limited tolerance for what they deem acceptable noise introduced in their use of mobile phones
It is our belief that the negative effect of these factors can be diminished through proper design of a cellular network. Thus, the aim of the design is the goal of making mobile phone networks more efficient by means of effective network design while keeping development costs low.
Project description
The goal of our project is to develop a mathematical model of a CDMA cellular phone network for the purpose of optimizing the location of cell phone towers. We will model all the technology involved and model the mobile phone use characteristics in the creation of the model. Our design will hopefully provide a framework for cellular network design.
Design methodology
The selected design approach for this project is the Waterfall design method. This method was selected since the inherent nature of the topic selected does not entirely suit an iterative design approach, as in the Spiral Design method. Below, the steps of the waterfall design approach are examined as they relate to this project.
Requirements (objectives)
- accept specific user demographic input data and parameters
- represent input data in stochastic form
- optimization of mobile tower locations
- measure benefit due to network optimization
Analysis
The analysis portion of the design methodology is considered to be primarily research, both of CDMA networks and potential stochastic method optimization problems.
Design
Once the alternatives have been determined in the previous analysis design stage, a comparison of the optimization solution alternatives can be examined and evaluated as to there worth. The result of this list of alternatives will be a set of several solution methods that will be used for the actual solving of the problem. Also included in the design phase is the construction of a model with which we can use in the testing and implementation of our optimization algorithm.
Implementation and testing
Due to the nature of the project, this stage is somewhat combined with the design stage. The difficult part of the project is the design of the algorithm, which, once designed, is somewhat simple to implement. In short, the implementation and testing phase refers to the testing and incorporation of the optimization model into the cellular CDMA network that was constructed above.