Two-Step Dynamic Cell Optimization Algorithm for HAPS Mobile Communications

High altitude platform stations are attracting much attention as novel mobile communication platforms for ultra-wide coverage areas and disaster-resilient networks. Multi-cell configurations can increase communication capacity in a wide area. Conventional work optimizes the cell configuration for a multi-cell configuration based on a genetic algorithm (GA). This method identifies an optimal cell configuration in terms of spectral efficiency depending on the number of cells under a uniform user distribution. However, user distributions differ depending on location; thus, cell configuration optimization is also required for non-uniform user distributions. The problem is an increased number of parameters because each cell requires different antenna parameters for non-uniform user distribution compared to a uniform user distribution. This increases the difficulty of optimization, even when using a GA in some cases. Therefore, we propose a GA-based two-step cell optimization algorithm that comprises both search space reduction and antenna parameter optimization steps to address this problem. The proposed method employs the concept of co-evolution, i.e., a divide-and-conquer method. The proposed method divides multiple cells into several groups to reduce the number of optimized parameters and optimizes each group in order. In addition, the search space is reduced based on a marginal histogram obtained via optimization with a large step size. Simulation results demonstrate that this technique can reduce the number of combinations compared to the case without sub-area division. In addition, there are cases where the search space reduction further reduces the number of combinations without degrading the sum of the square root of throughput.