Patent ID: 7768968
Filing Date: 2010-08-03
Classification: H04W

Abstract:
1. A method of optimizing real cellular, wireless communication networks providing telecommunication services simultaneously to a plurality of subscribers and having a network configuration comprising a plurality of radio cells, each said radio cell covering a coverage region, said wireless communication network being sub-divided into area elements, said network configuration being defined by network configuration parameters, said method comprising the steps of: transmitting, in each said cell a reference signal of constant transmission power; providing for each said area element a cell-referenced value of the power received from one or more of said reference signals, respectively; providing a model of said communication network having an original model network configuration; assigning each of said area elements to the cell with the best reception power, said assignments defining cell areas in said model of the communication network; iteratively optimizing said model network configuration by determining a subscriber traffic per cell by accumulating and measuring service-specific network subscriber traffic values of said area elements assigned to a cell for all cells respectively and locally displacing said cell areas by variation of network configuration parameters to achieve a maximum balance of the traffic distribution between the cells, so as to provide an optimized model network configuration; wherein in said step of iteratively optimizing said model network configuration, results of each said iteration are physically implemented into the network and measured; wherein said iterative optimization further comprises determining that said step of iteratively optimizing said model network configuration has resulted in an optimized network configuration, wherein said determination step is based on a comparison of whether the difference of the subscriber traffic per cell of each cell and the average of the subscriber traffic for all cells exceeds an optimization threshold; and validating said optimized network configuration by subsequent network simulation of the optimized network configuration to determine if the optimized network configuration meets specified quality and coverage requirements, so that if said validating by subsequent network simulation determines that the optimized network configuration fails to meet specified quality and coverage requirements, the network configuration is adjusted to meet the specified quality and coverage requirements and implementing said validated or adjusted network configuration in said real communication network; wherein said step of determining a subscriber traffic per cell by accumulating and measuring said service-specific network subscriber traffic values further comprises continuously monitoring said service-specific network subscriber traffic values and continuously feeding said service-specific network subscriber traffic values back into the iterative optimization step; wherein, said step of validating said optimized network configuration by subsequent network simulation uses a statistical network simulation method to model the time-related behavior of said communication network by taking into account multiple instantaneous states of the communication network.