Base station placement in indoor wireless systems using binary integer programming

The placement of base stations is an important issue in planning wireless systems because it can have a significant influence on the overall system performance. In this paper, we propose a novel binary integer programming formulation of the base station placement problem that allows the user to find an optimal base station configuration in an interference-limited CDMA system using the branch-and-bound (B&B) method. The results are compared to those obtained from a customised version of genetic algorithm (GA). It is shown that although the B&B method guarantees an optimal solution, its computational time increases dramatically with the size of the problem and hence its application may be restricted to small problems. In contrast, although the customised GA method does not guarantee an optimal solution, it is shown to be effective in solving the base station placement problem in most cases and its computational time does not increase as dramatically as the B&B method. This observation suggests that the GA may be useful for solving larger problems where the B&B method fails to find a solution within a reasonable time