A symbolic regression approach to manage femtocell coverage using grammatical genetic programming

We present a novel application of Grammatical Evolution to the real-world application of femtocell coverage. A symbolic regression approach is adopted in which we wish to uncover an expression to automatically manage the power settings of individual femtocells in a larger femtocell group to optimise the coverage of the network under time varying load. The generation of symbolic expressions is important as it facilitates the analysis of the evolved solutions. Given the multi-objective nature of the problem we hybridise Grammatical Evolution with NSGA-II connected to tabu search. The best evolved solutions have superior power consumption characteristics than a fixed coverage femtocell deployment.