Overture uses two main mechanisms to help safeguard the network configuration: Ranges
and Site Constraints.
Ranges can be applied to individual sectors and radios to restrict the values
that their properties can take. For example, you can set the azimuth range of a
Sector
to prevent the sector from taking invalid or unsuitable azimuth values. Ranges are
used extensively by the
Parameter Optimization Module
to define the search space of possible parameter values.
Ranges apply to a single parameter of a site or sector, but sometimes it is useful
to make the valid configurations of a sector or radio depend on the configurations
of the other sectors and radios on the same site. Overture uses Constraints
to manage these situations.
Some example situations might make this clearer:
- You want to ensure that no two antennas on the same site can be closer than 45 degrees.
- A site has mounting points at different heights, but you want to ensure that all
sectors have the same height.
- You would like to ensure that all radios on a given site use a different channel.
Constraints allow you address all these requirements. Any constraints you set up
will also be obeyed by the
Parameter Optimization Module
when it is trying new network configurations.
You can add, remove or edit constraints from the menu option:
The Status property of the constraint indicates
whether or not it is currently valid, and the Site
property tells you which site it is applied to. Each site can have many constraints;
they are typically set up in the
Site Template
that is used to import the data.
You can add various types of constraint to your sites:
- All Different. This can applied to any sector or radio property with a range.
A typical use case would be where you want to ensure that the channels used by the
radios on a given site are all different.
- All Same. This can applied to any sector or radio property with a range.
A typical use case would be where you want to ensure that the height of each sector
on a site is the same.
- Azimuth Separation. This ensures that the azimuths of all sectors on a site
are further apart than a given value.
- Maximally Different. This is similar to the All Different constraint and
can be applied to any sector or radio property with a range. This tries to ensure
that property it is applied to is a different as possible. One use case for this
is where you wish to make all channels on a site different, but you have more radios
than channels on some sites. For example, in a WiMAX network you may have three
channels, but you may also have 4-sector sites. It is not possible to assign each
radio a unique channel; this constraint will ensure that only one radio shares the
same channel as another.