Radio Network Planning and Resource Optimization: Mathematical Models and Algorithms for UMTS, WLANs, and Ad Hoc Networks

The tremendous popularity of wireless technologies has created a considerable expansion of wireless networks both in size and use. This fact, together with a great variety of mobile devices and numerous different services that are becoming increasingly resource-demanding, have attracted the attention of many researchers into the area of radio resource planning and optimization. Due to network complexity, these tasks require intelligent, automated approaches that are able to deal with many factors in order to enable design of high capacity networks with a high service quality at the lowest possible cost. This is a perfect application of optimization theory.

In this thesis, mathematical optimization is considered as the main approach to designing and improving the performance of wireless networks such as Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) and ad hoc networks. Due to different underlying access technologies, the optimization goals, design parameters and system limitations vary by network type. Therefore, the goals of the presented work are to identify a relevant optimization problem for each type of network, to model the problem and to apply the optimization approach in order to facilitate wireless network planning and improve radio resource utilization.