IncrEase: A Tool for Incremental Planning of Rural Fixed Broadband Wireless Access Networks

The coverage footprint of most Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) networks is not set in stone but varies over its lifetime, usually by expanding incrementally as new transmissions sites are rolled out or by adding capacity as demand changes and increases. We thus propose the incremental planning paradigm as an effective strategy for planning and deploying BWA networks, such as those operated by WISPs or community organisations. We believe incremental planning allows to anticipate return of investment and to overcome the limited network infrastructure (e.g., backhaul fibre links) in rural areas. Our IncrEase tool elaborates a varied set of operational metrics to guide the operator in identifying the regions that would benefit the most from a network upgrade, automatically suggesting the set of "moves" (e.g., new transmission sites to deploy) that leads to the best long term strategy. We benchmark the computation time of our tool and evaluate it using data from a large-scale ISP network with access to over 8,900 transmission towers.