A concept for dynamic neighbor cell list planning in a cellular system

In the near future, capacity needs will lead to cellular systems with a complex mixture of cells with different sizes and unpredictable coverage areas. Such complex systems will increase the need for manual radio network planning dramatically, unless intelligent tools are developed to assist in the planning. This paper addresses the problem of determining which cells are neighbors to a certain cell in a TDMA system. At present this has to be manually determined for each cell in a system. A concept is proposed where the neighbor cell lists are dynamically planned during system operation, with little or no manual assistance. The proposed class of algorithms uses information about the long term network behavior, and the neighbor cell lists are continuously updated. The proposed concept considerably reduces manual planning, and simulation results show that the scheme also improves the overall system quality by reducing the length of the neighbor cell lists.