Design and Development of an Automatic Frequency Planning Tool for Cellular Networks

Abstract

Frequency planning, in ever growing cellular networks, is an extremely arduous task. Any effort to lay down manual frequency plans promulgates inefficiency in the cellular radio systems. The extensive deployment and penetration of cellular networks necessitates the need to carry out automatic frequency planning. The outcome of this project is a novel and ingenious algorithm for automatic generation and optimization of the frequency plan whereby curtailing the intra-system interference levels within the acceptable ranges of the key performance indicators (KPI’s) defined for any real time cellular network. The automatic frequency planning and optimization has been done using the concept of Inter-Cell Dependency Matrix (ICDM) which contains cell correlations in terms of the affect one cell has on the other primarily with regards to the co-channel interference. The proposed algorithm has been set forth and tested using inputs from live network data. It has been found to satisfy the verifiable network performance metrics.