On Cost-Effective, Reliable Coverage for LoS Communications in Urban Areas

Abstract

The use of ultra high frequencies in 5G and future networks to improve transmission speeds and capacity requires that users' equipment remain in Line of Sight with the access antennas most of the service time. This requirement implies a change in perspective to plan the coverage: Antennas cannot be placed on roofs or remote antenna sites, and a robust coverage is based on multi-antenna visibility from any point. This paper tackles the problem of public street coverage in urban areas with a data-driven methodology. Starting from 3D digital maps, we formalize the problem of antenna placement as a set coverage problem and leverage powerful heuristics to implement a general algorithm that allows the exploration of different policies, returning the detailed coverage, the antenna placement, and the cost of the coverage. Results on 15 areas in 3 Italian cities show the properties of different policies and confirm for the first time on large scale real data the feasibility of Line of Sight communications with a sustainable number of antennas per km 2 .

Vehicles or Pedestrians: On the gNB Placement in Ultradense Urban Areas

“…These new communication technologies are much more susceptible to obstruction and they need Lineof-Sight (LoS) to function reliably. For these reasons, the placement strategy of base stations is crucial, and as already shown in previous works, an optimal choice of such locations can lead to substantial savings for network operators [2].…”

“…Step one is a novel contribution of this paper. The solution to the second step comes from a previous publication in which we introduced the problem of coverage as a variation of the classical maximum subset coverage problem [2], the third step modifies the solution proposed therein to take into account the weights introduced in step one.…”

“…Since the above-described coverage problem is NP-Hard in our past work we relied on a polynomial greedy heuristic with bounded error to efficiently find a quasi-optimal solution [2].…”

On the Properties of Next Generation Wireless Backhaul

“…In a recent paper [25], we took advantage of the same opendata and a similar GPU-based approach, to find the optimal placement for gNBs in a LoS coverage context.…”