Outage contours using a Voronoi diagram

Abstract

The outage contour is the boundary surrounding a cell, where the signal to interference plus noise ratio reaches a minimum acceptable value. In a mobile communication network, this contour is used in planning frequency reuse, dynamic or fixed channel allocation and cell breathing. This work presents these outage contours as a multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagram. Each base station is a generating point of this diagram, with a corresponding weight. The weights are obtained by use of radio parameters as antenna heights, transmission power, receiver sensitivity and specific-environment propagation characteristics. The cells outage contours are represented by the edges of the Voronoi diagram, obtained by comparison between the ranges of the base stations radio signal from adjacent cells. The results show that the signal to interference plus noise ratio can be mapped to a distance ratio. The distance ratio, instead of power ratio, makes it possible to represent the outage, a signal service dependent parameter, by means of the outage contour, a geometric approach, using the geometric structure called Voronoi diagram.