Models and Solvers for Coverage Optimisation in Cellular Networks: Review and Analysis

Abstract

Cellular phone networks are one of the most widely-used means of communication whose design is a quality-determining task. During the former step many engineering problems must be solved and where coverage optimisation is one of the most critical ones. The latter was proven to be NP-hard which has led to proposing several scattered and non-unified mathematical models to solve it. This models’ heterogeneity hinders comparing or linking works to accelerate advances in this field and it also hardens choosing the adequate model for a given case study. In order to cope with these issues, this work presents a systematic survey on coverage optimisation models. It analyses 80 works done from 1995 to 2021. The comparison considers 6 comparison metrics and 3 classes of coverage models. Our work’s contributions aim at (I) coping with the lack of models’ standardisation, (II) providing practitioners with a repository of coverage models, (III) sketching guidelines of a unified model, and (IV) opening future research perspectives in this axis.