Planning of Small Cells in Unlicensed Band for Addis Ababa Deployment Scenario

To address the increasing capacity demand due to innovative data services, densification of mobile networks has been considered as one key systematic solution while expanding applied spectrum band through aggregation including usage of the unlicensed bands. As a result, 3rd generation partnership project has already developed technologies that enable usage of small cells in unlicensed bands (SC-U) such as the underutilized 5GHz band. Such technologies exploiting unlicensed band are also expected to play significant role in fifth generation ultra-dense networks. Successful usage of SC-U requires planning of SC-U network considering resulted more tightly coupled capacity, coverage, cost, energy and other requirements, which is difficult to attain applying conventional network planning approach. In this paper, we present multiobjective optimization (MO) based planning work for efficient deployment of SC-U in 5GHz for an Addis Ababa Meskel-Square deployment scenario. Propagation computation is performed using deterministic dominant pathloss model using building and terrain maps of the deployment scenario. Results show that MO planning solution provides network topologies with optimal compromises among network capacity, cell edge throughput and network cost while avoiding the tedious iterative approach of conventional planning approach. Resulted topologies provide significant performance gains relative to small cell random deployments.