Self-organisation in future mobile communications

The concept of self-organisation in wireless networks is introduced. The paper proposes planning and deployment cost, capacity, coverage, flexibility and future potential as the criteria by which wireless topologies and resource management strategies should be validated. It discusses numerous techniques that can be considered as self-organising and evaluates the suitability of these techniques in both macro- and microcellular environments. A standard 4-carrier GSM base station is used as the reference cellular technology. It is demonstrated that, by combining suitable techniques, a potential future capacity increase of one order of magnitude (13 times) is estimated in a microcellular environment. Substantial capacity increments can also be achieved in macrocellular networks. When the cost of both planning and deployment is considered, intelligent relaying together with environment adaptation are shown to perform well and could reduce the cost of future networks to a tenth of their current level.