The Site Selection module provides a mechanism to automatically rank a set of candidate sites. It can be used to generate rollout-plans for expansion sites, to design green-field networks, for business development tasks such as nominal planning or strategic spectrum valuation, and to support day-to-day network planning activities.

This tutorial uses functionality from the Site Selection Module. This module can be installed by clicking the Install button on the Site Selection product page. Once installed, you will need to restart Overture to use this module's features.

This tutorial shows you how to use the Site Selection module for green-field network design. We will start by assuming that the steps in the Tutorial have been followed to set up the network below:

We will treat these sites as our candidate portfolio.

To get an idea of the network will all sites active, we can display the Serving Site analysis:

We now need the Site Selection subsection of the Start Page. You can find this by following the instructions here. The Site Selection page looks like this:

We first need to identify the set of candidate sites. The site selection process uses the currently selected set of sites as the candidate set. We want to use all sites as candidates, so we need to select all sites by clicking Select All Sites button at the bottom of the Site Selection page:

There are lots of other ways you can select sites; for more information see the tutorial here.

We are now ready to analyze our candidates. Click the Impact Analysis button on the Site Selection page to begin. The Impact Analysis measures the effect of each candidate in isolation: the statistics are measured when all other candidates are deactivated. When the analysis completes, the following report is produced:

This tells us that site 60691 has the most coverage. It covers quite a large area, and we may be concerned that it is a "boomer" site that may cause interference problems elsewhere in the network. We can investigate further by clicking on this entry in the table to examine its properties in the Properties Window:

At 45m above ground, this site is fairly high and we decide that it is a boomer site and that it should be removed from the set of candidates. To do this, we expand the Flag Values property and set the the Selection Rejected flag to "Likely Interferer":

Having pruned out the boomer site, we can now run the Site Selection process on the remaining set. Return to the Site Selection page and select all the sites again as before. Then click the Start button. The following table is shown when the process completes:

This shows the sites in rollout priority order. The site with the biggest impact is first, then the site with the biggest impact after the coverage of the first site is taken account is next and so forth. You can see the effect of this in the increasing values of the "Served Area" column.

The values in the "Δ Served Area" column show the differences between each successive row of the table. It is clear that the additional benefit of the last six or so sites in the plan is limited. This is also evident if we plot the increase in served area by additional site, we get the following:

This shows use that removing the last six sites in the rollout plan will cause the overall coverage to drop by 5%. We decide that this is a good saving, and decide to deactivate these last six sites.

We can do this directly from the rollout plan, by first clicking on the row for site MCD005318, then holding down Shift and clicking the last site in the list, MCD005368. The properties for these six sites then appear in the Properties Window:

Expand the Flag Values property, then set the Selection Rejected flag to "Limited Value". Then click the Unplan Selection button in the Site Selection page to mark these sites as unplanned.

We now need to reactivate all our planned sites. To do this, click the Select Planned Sites button and then click the button from the Toolbar to display the properties of the Radios of the selected sites:

Set the Active property of these radios to True. The map should now look something like this:

The Serving Site analysis for the completed network design looks like this:

The site selection module has enabled us to design a network that achieves 95% of the possible coverage using only 60% of the available sites.

Remarks

For simplicity of exposition, the analysis in the above tutorial was done using area coverage as the Key Performance Indicator. However, Overture's flexible statistical system means that you can easily drive the site selection process using subscribers or business locations, or use complex target areas to specify the region of interest. You can also take account of differing site acquisition costs.

For more information about features of the site selection module, see the reference entry here. More information about setting up and using Objectives can be found here.