A Heuristic Approach for Antenna Positioning in Cellular Networks

Overview & Synopsis

The antenna-positioning problem concerns finding a set of sites for antennas from a set of pre-defined candidate sites, and for each selected site, to determine the number and types of antennas, as well as the associated values for each of the antenna parameters. All these choices must satisfy a set of imperative constraints and optimize a set of objectives. This paper presents a heuristic approach for tackling this complex and highly combinatorial problem. The proposed approach is composed of three phases: a constraint-based pre-processing phase to filter out bad configurations, an optimization phase using tabu search, and a post-optimization phase to improve solutions given by tabu search. To validate the approach, computational results are presented using large and realistic data sets.