Cost-Efficient Millimeter Wave Base Station Deployment in Manhattan-Type Geometry

Abstract

Urban millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are limited by link outage due to frequent blockages by obstacles. One approach to this problem is to increase the density of base stations (BSs) to achieve macro diversity gains. Dense BS deployment, however, incurs the increased BS installation cost as well as power consumption. In this work, we propose a framework for connectivity-constrained minimum cost mmWave BS deployment in Manhattan-type geometry (MTG). A closed-form expression of network connectivity is characterized as a function of various factors such as obstacle sizes, BS transmit power, and the densities of obstacles and BSs. Optimization that attains the minimum cost is made possible by incorporating a tight lower bound of the analyzed connectivity expression. A low-complexity algorithm is devised to effectively find an optimal tradeoff between the BS density and transmit power that results in the minimum BS deployment cost while guaranteeing network connectivity. Numerical simulations corroborate our analysis and quantify the best tradeoff of the BS density and transmit power. The proposed BS deployment strategies are evaluated in different network cost configurations, providing useful insights in mmWave network planning and dimensioning.