Efficient Heuristic Solutions for Wireless Communication Systems Planning

This paper presents two novel heuristic algorithms for the design of wireless access networks laying special emphasis to the design of indoor CDMA based and Fixed Wireless networks. Both methods are based on Graph Theory and they are essentially greedy algorithms. The first objective of the two heuristics is to place a number of access points/base stations in a number of candidate sites and the second objective is to assign a number of fixed wireless terminals to the selected access points/base stations. Capacity constraints and power reception characteristics are both considered. The two algorithms were compared with an analogous optimisation problem through a series of tests. The results indicate that regarding design costs the performance of the heuristics is very close to this of the equivalent optimisation problem. The solution times for the heuristics are essentially smaller especially when large topologies are considered. Index Terms — Wireless Access Networks, Integer Linear Programming (ILP), Heuristic Algorithms, Graph Theory.