Patent ID: 8630652

Claim:
A method for determining one or more locations within a geographical region for deploying a network element of a communications network, the method comprising: obtaining mobile device traffic information associated with the geographical region; obtaining signal strength information associated with the geographical region; determining a plurality of candidate locations based on the traffic information and the signal strength information, using a network planning device; determining capacity values for each of the candidate locations, using the network planning device; and selecting a candidate location, from among the plurality of candidate locations, as a placement location for the network element based on the capacity values, using the network planning device, wherein the determining the plurality of candidate locations includes, applying a clustering algorithm to the signal strength information to generate a first set of locations, applying a clustering algorithm to the traffic information to generate a second set of locations, and selecting the plurality of candidate locations based on the first and second generated sets of locations, and wherein the selecting the plurality of candidate locations based on the first and second generated sets of locations includes, determining a plurality of distance values based on Euclidean distances between each of the first set of generated location values, and each of the second set of generated location values, and selecting, as the plurality of candidate locations, location values from among the first and second sets of generated location values based on the plurality of distance values.