2422
12, DECEMBER 2019
Greenfield Design in 5G FWA Networks
Omar Kaddoura , José Outes-Carnero, Juan A. García-Fernández , Rocio Acedo-Hernández ,
Maria Cerón-Larrubia, Lorena Ríos, Juan J. Sánchez-Sánchez , and Raquel Barco
Abstract— With the arrival of 5G, Fixed Wireless Access,
which aims at providing households with broadband internet
access using mobile technology, has become a relevant use case.
Current greenfield design techniques are not optimal since they
target at optimizing the radiofrequency configuration for the
whole household, sometimes at the expense of other households.
However, optimizing only the spot where to install the antenna
of the customer premises equipment is enough for Fixed Wire-
less Access networks. This letter presents an enhancement of
automatic greenfield design methodology so that, apart from
finding the location where to deploy network base stations and
the optimal configuration of network parameters, the optimal
location where to deploy customer premises equipment is also
determined. A greenfield design exercise has been carried out in a
real scenario proving that the proposed method both improves the
final network performance and reduces the required deployment
economic costs compared with state-of-the-art methodology.
Index Terms— Greenfield design, FWA, ACP, radio network
planning, radio network optimization.
I. I NTRODUCTION
O VER the years, internet service providers have made
efforts to bring broadband services to homes and
increase service data rates. Nowadays, with regards to the
last mile of connectivity between the network architecture
and homes, the technologies that enable broadband internet
access can be classified into two main groups: fixed and
wireless. In this context, fixed technologies use cables and
wireless technologies use air interface. Among these, fixed
technologies have predominated over wireless technologies to
bring broadband internet access to homes since they achieve
higher service data rates.
Especially, the growing demand for multimedia services has
been satisfied with the arrival of optical fiber, which has been
introduced into homes thanks to technologies like Fiber To The
Home (FTTH) [1]. However, bringing optical fiber to homes
is expensive due to the cost associated with infrastructure
deployment. Because of this, wireless technologies, which
eliminate the need of cabling, are considered as the best
alternative to fixed technologies. Fixed Wireless Access (FWA)
is one of the architectures designed to bring broadband internet
access to homes [2]. FWA consists in replacing the last mile
of cables by air interface so that a single network transceiver
provides broadband service to multiple homes provided with
specific Customer Premises Equipment (CPE).
Manuscript received August 13, 2019; accepted September 1, 2019. Date of
publication September 5, 2019; date of current version December 10, 2019.
The associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for
publication was H. Zhang. (Corresponding author: Omar Kaddoura.)
O. Kaddoura and R. Barco are with the Department of Com-
munication Engineering, University of Malaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain
(omar.kaddoura@ericsson.com).
J. Outes-Carnero, J. A. García-Fernández, R. Acedo-Hernández,
M. Cerón-Larrubia, L. Ríos, and J. J. Sánchez-Sánchez are with Ericsson AB,
29590 Málaga, Spain.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2019.2939470
1558-2558 © 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO.
Until the present, FWA has been discarded as an alternative
to fixed technologies since wireless technologies were not able
to reach data rates provided by optical fiber. Nevertheless, with
the advent of 5G and the standardization of New Radio (NR),
data rates that wireless technologies may reach can compete
with those provided by fixed technologies. This is mainly due
to two factors: better spectral efficiency achieved thanks to the
appearance of smart antennas and the increase of the available
bandwidth thanks to the use of millimeter waves [3].
Particularly, the deployment of FWA networks is relevant
in suburban and rural areas, where the distances between
homes are larger than in urban areas, so that the amount of
cable required to provide homes with broadband services is
higher. In addition, suburban and rural areas are favorable to
millimeter waves, since these require the absence of obstacles
between transmitter and receiver [4]. The utilization of mil-
limeter waves also requires that FWA CPEs have their antennas
mounted on the rooftops of the households and connected to
indoor 5G Wi-Fi routers.
In order to minimize the costs required to deploy the
infrastructure of a network, a proper planning exercise is
needed. This planning consists in selecting the locations where
to install the network elements and designing their correspond-
ing configuration to maximize the final network performance.
A planning exercise with no legacy networks is known as
greenfield design. Greenfield design activities aim at finding
the best network configuration to satisfy the demand of
users while minimizing the cost of the network deployment.
Greenfield design is composed of two main and independent
stages: radio network planning (i.e., selecting the proper
locations where to install the base stations) and radio network
optimization (i.e., selecting appropriate values for network
parameters like power allocation, height of antennas, azimuth
of antennas, tilt of antennas, mobility thresholds, …).
This letter proposes the enhancement of existing greenfield
design methods so that they can also be applied to FWA
networks. In addition, in this letter, the optimality of the results
of state-of-the-art methods is improved by adding an itera-
tive algorithm which combines both radio network planning
and radio network optimization stages. Moreover, the pro-
posed method suits operators’ demands to efficiently per-
form greenfield design activities thanks to employing greedy
algorithm.
This letter is organized as follows. Section II reviews state-
of-the-art greenfield design techniques for mobile communi-
cation networks and highlights the problem of using these
to design FWA networks. In Section III, a greenfield design
method customized for FWA networks is described. Finally,
Section IV addresses the goodness of the proposed method for
greenfield design of NR FWA networks when applied to a real
suburban environment.
KADDOURA et al.: GREENFIELD DESIGN IN 5G FWA NETWORKS
II. R ELATED W ORK AND P ROBLEM F ORMULATION
FWA greenfield design methodology aims at finding the best
combination of deployed base stations, CPEs antennas location
and network parameter configuration. Therefore, finding the
best network configuration is translated into a combinatorial
optimization problem.
Among the total number of candidate locations L where to
deploy base stations, any subset of l base stations corresponds
to a possible network configuration. Therefore, the size of
the search space of all possible base stations configurations
is represented as follows:
L  
L for FWA networks must find not only the optimum location
(1)
l and configuration of network equipment but also the best
l=0
Regarding the configuration of parameters, being P the total
number of parameters to be configured and Npl the number of
possible values that parameter p in base station l may have,
the size of the search space of parameter configuration is
described as follows:
P
Npl (2)
p=1
In conventional networks, (1) and (2) can be combined
to calculate the size of the search space. However, in FWA
networks, the combinatorial problem is increased since the
possible location of CPEs antennas must be taken into con-
sideration. Thus, being Nk the number of demand nodes in
household k and being K the total number of households,
the size of the search space of possible locations where install
network CPEs antennas is represented as follows:
K

Nk
k=1
Therefore, the size of the search space of FWA greenfield
design is as follows:
⎡ l ⎤ K
 L    P 
⎣ L
Npl ⎦ Nk (4)
l p=1
l=0 k=1
Since the evaluation of the full search space in mobile
communication networks is not feasible, initially, greenfield
design was carried out by skilled engineers in the field of
Radio-frequency (RF), who evaluated the impact of different
network configurations over the final network performance.
However, the great success of mobile technologies boosted
the growth of these networks so that manual design became
2423
According to the state of the art, greenfield design methods
are based on discrete population models for the traffic descrip-
tion [11]. In these models, the locations where users can be
found are discretized into bins known as demand nodes. This
discretization allows evaluating the performance of a given
network configuration as the aggregation of the performance
in all the demand nodes into which the network is divided.
Nevertheless, as analyzed by authors in [12], this model is
not valid in FWA networks, since the location of the CPE
antenna is unknown in advance. This is, the traffic demanded
by a given household cannot be assigned to a specific demand
node. In fact, since automatic greenfield design techniques
spot where to install the CPE antenna, a new methodology
is required. Moreover, radio network planning and radio net-
work optimization are executed as two independent phases
of current greenfield design techniques. However, they could
be combined so they cooperate with each other to find the
optimum network configuration.
Therefore, the next section presents a modification of ACP
methods so that the location of CPEs antennas is also opti-
mized. In addition, next section also presents an iterative
algorithm which combines both radio network planning and
radio network optimization to enhance state-of-the-art green-
field design techniques for FWA networks.
III. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
The automatic method herein described allows performing
greenfield design activities in FWA networks. The proposed
method finds proper locations where to install network trans-
ceivers (base stations and CPEs antennas) as well as it opti-
mizes the configuration of network parameters.
(3) A. FWA Cost Function
Being S a network state (i.e., a list of active cells together
with the parameter values assigned to each cell), automatic
radio network planning and network optimization methods
aim at finding the optimal network state Sbest . This is,
the minimum number of base stations and the optimal config-
uration of network parameters which maximize the network
performance. For this, these methods define cost functions to
describe a figure of merit of the network performance. Thus,
the classical optimization problem is reduced to finding Sbest
which minimizes the cost function Φ (S) [5], [13]:
Sbest = argmin (Φ (S)) (5)
S
N
 M

Φ (S) = αi ωj δij (S) (6)
i=1 j=1
unfeasible. Therefore, to overcome the previous, computer
assisted methods known as Automatic Cell Planning (ACP) [5]
arose and played a crucial role.
Regarding the automation of radio network planning, in [6],
three primitive alternatives were presented to find optimum
base station locations. However, over time, new technologies
were standardized and radio network planning was modified
to consider interference [7], throughput [8] or cell loading [9].
With respect to radio network optimization, metaheuristic
algorithms as well as artificial neural networks were proposed
to find the best configuration of network parameters [10].
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0, if objective for performance indicator is met
δ (S) =
1, otherwise
(7)
where N is the number of demand nodes in the network and
M is the number of performance indicators (i.e., coverage,
capacity, quality, …). The traffic demanded in demand node i
is represented as αi . The relevance of performance indicator
j is indicated by weight ωj . δij (S) is the value of function
δ (S) for performance indicator j at demand node i.
2424 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2019

Unlike classical greenfield design, finding the optimum CPE Algorithm 1 Automatic FWA Greenfield Design
antenna location is part of greenfield design in FWA networks. Input : Households demand nodes location
Therefore, final locations of households’ demand nodes are Candidate CPE antenna locations
unknown in advance. To overcome this, a new automatic Weights and objectives
algorithm needs to described so that the cost function is Output: Best network configuration Sbest
1 C ← ΦFWA (Sinitial ) // Initial cost
influenced only by the best CPE antenna location found in 2 S ← Sinitial // Initial network state
every household. This letter proposes a modification of the 3 repeat
cost function used to evaluate the network performance. Thus, 4 done ← true
for FWA networks, the cost function in (6) is transformed into /* Radio network planning */
the next: 5 A←∞
L foreach candidate base station do
 6
ΦFWA (S) = αk · min Tk (S) (8) 7 Sbs
cand := S adding
candidate base station
k=1 8 B ← ΦFWA Sbs cand
9 if B < A then
where 10 A←B
 
best ← Scand
Sbs bs
Tk (S) = R1k (S) , R2k (S) , . . . , RN
k
k
(S) (9) 11
12 end
and 13 end
M
14 S ← Sbs

best
/* Radio network optimization */
Rik (S) = ωj δij (S) (10) 15 A←∞
j=1 16 foreach candidate value of every parameter do
where L is the number of households in the network, Nk is 17 Spcand := S including candidate value
18 B ← ΦFWA (Spcand )
the number of candidate demand nodes in household k and M 19 if B < A then
is the number of performance indicators. The traffic demanded 20 A←B
by household k is represented as αk . Vector Tk (S) represents 21 Spbest ← Spcand
the collection of costs associated with each candidate demand 22 end
node in household k, and Rik (S) represents the cost of 23 end
S ← Spbest
candidate demand node i in household k. 24
25 D ← ΦFWA (S)
Contrary to other state-of-the-art cost functions Φ (S), FWA 26 if D < C then
cost function ΦFWA (S) relies on a vector Tk (S) which rep- 27 C←D
resents all the candidate demand nodes of a household (i.e., 28 done ← false
the candidate CPE antenna locations). Hence, from all these 29 end
locations, the one providing the lowest cost is considered as 30 until done;
31 return S
the demand node of the entire household and then used in the
evaluation of the system cost function.

Automatic FWA greenfield design is summarized in

B. FWA Greenfield Design Algorithm
As previously explained, greenfield design is composed of
two main stages: radio network planning and radio network
optimization. Commonly, these two phases are carried out
separately. Firstly, all the locations where to deploy network
base stations are identified. Secondly, optimization algorithms
are used to configure network parameters to achieve superior
network performance.
Unlike other state-of-the-art methods, this letter proposes
an automatic iterative greedy algorithm which combines
both radio network planning and radio network optimization.
In every iteration, firstly the algorithm searches the best
location where to add one new base station and secondly, all
network parameters are optimized taking into consideration the
new addition. The algorithm finishes once the cost function
cannot be improved, returning the best locations where to
deploy CPEs antennas and network base stations as well as
the optimum configuration of network parameters.
One might think that this algorithm does not guarantee
global optimality. However, as stated in [10], since networks
are designed to present low cell coupling so that their per-
formance is maximized, greedy algorithm yields very good
results faster than other metaheuristic algorithms.
Algorithm 1.
IV. R ESULTS
The method proposed in this letter was evaluated in a subur-
ban 3x3 km2 area at King County, Washington (United States
of America). This activity consisted in providing broadband
access to 4520 households using NR as enabling air interface
technology. To achieve this goal, a total of 1373 lampposts
were identified as candidate locations where to install base
stations. Trisector antennas with fixed azimuth separation
of 120 degrees were chosen to be deployed at candidate base
station locations. RF spectrum was configured to be deployed
in frequency band n257 [14], using 28 GHz carrier frequency
for both DL and UL and 200 MHz bandwidth. Drive tests were
carried out to perform RF propagation measurements used to
calibrate Planet® 3D Model [15] so that losses from candidate
base station locations to candidate CPE antenna locations were
estimated. Finally, drive test data were rasterized in 2D grids
per candidate base station. The demand nodes of the grids
represent RF measurements in the rooftops of the households.
2x2 m2 was considered as high enough resolution to assume
that propagation conditions will not change inside every
demand node.

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KADDOURA et al.: GREENFIELD DESIGN IN 5G FWA NETWORKS
TABLE I
O PTIMIZATION PARAMETERS
TABLE II
O PTIMIZATION O BJECTIVES
Table I summarizes the configuration and constraints of the
main optimization parameters. By applying these to (4), one
can observe that the search space consists of approximately
1.89 · 108475 possible network configurations among which
to find the best one. Therefore, the need for optimization
algorithms is highlighted as extremely significant.
An Ericsson internal optimization tool was used to carry out
the exercise. Two different test cases were defined to validate
the improvement achieved by the proposed method. The first
test case allowed evaluating the network performance in FWA
networks when using the proposed cost function. The second
test case allowed assessing the proposed iterative algorithm
that combines both radio network planning and radio network
optimization. In order to perform the evaluation of the results,
the demand node presenting the best cost per household was
chosen as the selected CPE antenna location.
Three different boolean performance indicators were used
to evaluate the cost function in this activity:
• Coverage. Good coverage is determined by a threshold
which specifies the minimum required received signal
strength. Coverage is used to identify areas where the
received signal strength is enough so connection estab-
lishment can be guaranteed.
• Dominance. Good dominance is determined by two con-
ditions. The first condition is the minimum received
signal strength of a cell to be considered as interfering
the best server. The second condition is the maximum
number of cells interfering the best server. Dominance is
used to identify how cells in the network interfere to each
other. Specially, how the best server (i.e., the cell received
with highest signal strength) is interfered by others. Since
network performance is usually limited by interference,
dominance is useful to estimate the quality of service.
• Capacity. Good capacity is determined by a peak data
rate value supported by a cell. Capacity is used to
identify cells providing coverage to demand nodes which,
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2425
Fig. 1. Evolution of cost function and performance indicators during the
optimization.
together, require more resources than available and cause
congestion issues.
Thus, these objectives were used to evaluate the network
performance in all the tests carried out. For this, the calibrated
Planet® 3D Model along with Ericsson Air 5121 radiation
patterns were used to calculate RF changes produced by
modifications in antenna azimuths. The values and weights
for all these objectives are summarized in Table II.
A. Test Case A. FWA Cost Function
This test case consisted in performing the classical green-
field design waterfall algorithm where radio network planning
and radio network optimization are executed separately using
two different cost functions: the classical cost function in (6)
and the proposed FWA cost function in (8). Unlike FWA cost
function where traffic is evaluated per household, in classical
cost function, household traffic was uniformly distributed
among all its demand nodes (i.e., candidate CPE antenna
locations) and, finally, the one in which the cost function is
minimized was chosen as the final CPE antenna location.
Fig. 1 depicts the evolution of the cost and the performance
indicators during the optimization exercise. According to its
weight, the capacity indicator drove the optimization and,
therefore, it correlates with the evolution of the cost. The
traffic demanded per household in this exercise was forecast
to 100 Mbps and every base station was composed of 3 cells
of which capacity objective was set to 2.5 Gbps. Therefore,
a maximum of 75 households (i.e., 1.66% of the total)
could be successfully served per base station. This effect was
observed during the first iterations of radio network plan-
ning in which the capacity indicator increased 1.66% every
iteration. However, mainly due to the constraints imposed to
base stations locations (i.e., the number of predefined locations
and the minimum distance among the selected ones), the cost
function converges logarithmically. Finally, a step can be
observed at the end of the curves of this test case due to the
azimuth optimization after the radio network planning phase.
Once the radio network planning and radio network
optimization finished, resulting network configurations were
evaluated in terms of target performance indicators as sum-
marized in Table III. All coverage, dominance and capacity
2426
TABLE III
T EST C ASES R ESULTS
performance indicators presented better figures when the
proposed cost function was used. Moreover, the proposed
cost function resulted in the selection of fewer base stations
than when using classical cost function, which decreases
the deployment costs. In addition, despite the reduction in
the number of base stations, the number of congested cells
also decreased when the proposed cost function was used.
Therefore, the proposed cost function resulted in the best
network performance.
The classical cost function aims at improving network
performance assuming users are located in all demand nodes
of the household. However, since the proposed cost function is
focused on improving the network performance in final CPE
antenna locations, the results meet the expectations.
B. Test Case B. FWA Greenfield Design Algorithm
This test case consisted in evaluating the combined algo-
rithm proposed in Algorithm 1. For this, the classical
greenfield design waterfall algorithm was compared with the
proposed one where radio network planning and radio network
optimization are executed iteratively.
Since, test case A proved the proposed cost function to
provide better results than the classical approach, then the
proposed cost function for FWA networks was used to evaluate
the network performance in this test case.
As for test case A, Fig. 1 depicts the evolution of the
cost and the performance indicators during the optimization
exercise. In overall, all the performance indicators as well as
the cost presented better figures when using the proposed cost
function and the combined algorithm than when not using
them. Moreover, the step observed at the end of the curves
when radio network planning and radio network optimization
were executed separately disappeared when both phases were
combined into a single iterative algorithm.
Regarding the final performance indicators, again, Table III
shows that all coverage, dominance and capacity performance
indicators decreased significantly. Moreover, the number of
required base stations to achieve these figures is lower than
the best obtained in test case A. These results have proven
that the combined algorithm outperforms the results obtained
by the classical waterfall algorithm.
V. C ONCLUSION
This letter has presented an automatic method to perform
greenfield design activities for FWA networks using NR
technology which, unlike other state-of-the-art methods, also
finds the optimal CPE antenna locations that improve the final
network performance.
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IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2019
The proposed method has been evaluated using data from
a real suburban environment. The results obtained have
demonstrated that the final network performance is improved
with respect to state-of-the-art methods while the deployment
costs (i.e., the number of required network base stations)
are reduced. Therefore, the proposed method is proven to
overcome cutting-edge methods to perform greenfield design
activities.
Moreover, this method may be subsequently used to adapt
FWA networks to the eventual changes of the RF environment.
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