Using Dynamic Sector Antenna Tilting Control for Load Balancing in Cellular Mobile Communications

In this paper the potential of a dynamic sector tilting control scheme is assessed. By intelligent control of the tilting angle for each sectoring antenna according to the current call traffic distribution, the whole cellular network performance can be improved by down-tilting the antenna around the source of peak traffic and up-tilting antennas in adjacent cells to fill in the coverage loss. We perform a constrained optimization of antenna tilting by using real-coded genetic algorithms (RCGA), and develop a CDMA cellular system simulator to evaluate the overall improvement of the system performance. A transformation of the problem space is used to remove the principal power constraint. Optimization results for two scenarios show potential capacity improvement of such a system exceeding 15%.