| Summary: | In telecommunications in general and in GSM in particular, the handover is a feature that guarantees a smooth transition of a call from one base station - that is for the purpose of this project an antenna - to another. In the recent ten years, the amount of data traffic through mobile telecommunications has doubled annually, putting an enormous strain on the network and forcing operators to upgrade with more and more base stations and new features. Although 3G and 4G are responsible for data traffic in most countries, GSM still provides more than 80% of the coverage for mobile devices around the world. Due to the increase in data traffic, 3G and 4G need to use more and more frequencies at the expense of GSM. An optimization of the GSM network is thus vital. In this project, we research two methods to automatically choose the parameters of interest (PoI) that govern the handover feature in each cell which is, roughly speaking, the area of coverage of one antenna. In one of these methods, the choice of cell- and cell-to-cell-specific parameters has its origins in control theory while the other method is based on mathematical optimization. In the mathematical sense, our goal is to optimize the quality of service over PoIs. Extensive simulations have been run using these PoIs in order to evaluate if and how the two different methods can effectively be used in reality. Several useful insights have been gained that will provide the basis for future work. The optimization approach in particular has proved to deliver good results within the limitations of the simulated environment used for testing.
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