Online Antenna Tilt-Based Capacity and Coverage Optimization

In the field of self-organizing networks (SONs), the use case of concurrent capacity and coverage optimization (CCO) is challenging, since the objectives are typically conflicting and adequate solutions often require interaction between a multitude of network sites. As a consequence, solving the CCO use case is particularly difficult. This work proposes an efficacious modification of an antenna tilt-based SON algorithm published in [1]. We propose using a probability distribution function (PDF) of throughput measurements and an estimate of the number of covered and uncovered users of each cell considered for optimization in order to construct an objective function which is better suited to jointly maximize throughput and coverage. Due to the limited amount of data required for computing the algorithm’s objective function, the SON solution proposed can be implemented not only following a centralized but also following a distributed architecture. Simulations show that the SON algorithm can exploit this additional information to increase its performance in terms of throughput gains.