Efficient placement of directional antennas in infrastructure-based wireless networks

Over the past decade, the use of directional antennas has immensely proliferated in wireless networks. Methodically positioning and orienting directional antennas can help reduce the interference while saving energy. In an infrastructure-based wireless network, wireless devices communicate through base stations. In this setting, directional antennas placed on the base stations form the backbone of the communication network. The wireless devices distributed around the base stations have bandwidth requirements that have to be satisfied by the directional antennas, and antennas constrained by hardware limits can only serve a limited number of devices. This introduces an optimization problem and in this paper, we develop an integer linear program for placing and directing antennas on multiple base stations to minimize the number of antennas required to serve all the wireless bandwidth demands. Through this integer programming formulation, we analyze the performance of directional antennas under various settings. A simulation-based evaluation using Cplex´s branch-and-bound algorithm demonstrates the efficacy of our approach and provides us further insights into these problems.