Real deployment data for cellular networks can be very convenient when elaborating simulation scenarios in scientific papers. In the following, we present an automation tool that enables to extract the geographical data of the base stations for the mobile operators in France.

You need a working python distribution with the following packages:

• selenium
• matplotlib

You also need to have a valid subscription on the ANFR (Agence Nationale des Fréquences) website.

1. Download or fork my repository from GitHub.

2. Launch the crawler script from your command line. The argument of the script corresponds to the postal code as in:

python antennes-mobiles-crawler.py 75014

You should obtain a text file named network-map-75014.txt in the /data directory. This file contains information on the antennas in the selected geographical area.

66007; 2G 3G 4G; BOUYGUES TELECOM; 1995-09-01; 2014-09-26; 156 R LÉON MAURICE NORDMANN; 75013; PARIS-13E--ARRONDISSEMENT; Oui; 
351124; 2G 3G 4G; BOUYGUES TELECOM; 2004-08-20; 2014-12-05; 22/24 R DU FAUBOURG ST JACQUES; 75014; PARIS-14E--ARRONDISSEMENT; Oui; 

The only missing information is the geographic position of the antennas. For this, you need the information from ANFR.

3. Go to ANFR, select the same city as previously and download the data (you should sign in and you will receive data by mail). Download the obtained data in data/cartoradio-75014/.

4. Launch the coordinate generation script:

python antenna-coordinate-generation.py 75014 orange 4G

• The first argument is the postal code.
• The second argument is the operator name and must be chosen from: orange - free - bouygues - sfr
• The last argument is the network type: 2G - 3G - 4G

5. Watch back and enjoy!

The output of the previous script consists of three files:

• A command file 75014_ORANGE_4G_antenna_coordinates.m that contains the coordinates for the antennas. You can simply load this file in MATLAB for your simulations.
• A figure plot of the antenna positions 75014-ORANGE-4G-antenna-map.png.
• A figure plot of the Voronoi diagram (the set of points in the geographic area closer to each antenna) 75014-ORANGE-4G-voronoi-map.png.

Orange 4G network in Paris 75014

We use the antenna positions generated by the scripts in our work entitled Joint Power-Delay Minimization in 4G Wireless Networks (Farah Moety, Samer Lahoud, Bernard Cousin, Kinda Khawam), published in the proceedings of the Wireless Days conference (WD'14) in 2014. We study the case of a realistic Long Term Evolution (LTE) Network where the challenge is the high computational complexity necessary to obtain the optimal solution. Therefore, we propose a simulated annealing based heuristic algorithm for the power-delay minimization problem. The proposed heuristic aims to compute the transmit power level of the network BSs and associate users with these BSs in a way that jointly minimizes the total network power and the total network delay.

Orange 2G network in Rennes (63 BSs)

Orange 3G network in Rennes (69 BSs)

Orange 4G network in Rennes (50 BSs)