Indoor Wireless Planning Using Smart Antennas

This paper considers the problem of indoor wireless planning using smart antennas. Smart antennas have gained much attention in wireless networking because of their capability in providing more spatial reuse and increased network capacity. Recent research has demonstrated their effectiveness in indoor environments where omni-directional antennas have been traditionally the dominant technology. Much of the work, however, assumes that a network is already deployed and focuses on scheduling antenna patterns. In this work, we investigate finding a wireless plan for an indoor environment where the wireless plan specifies minimum number of antennas required to provide complete coverage of the environment as well as the location, transmission power and beam pattern for each antenna. This problem is more challenging than radio planning using omnidirectional antennas because of the special shape of antenna beams. Both single-beam and multi-beam antenna patterns are considered and Integer Linear Programming formulations are provided for computing the minimum cost wireless plan. Moreover, to solve large-scale instances of the problem an efficient polynomial-time heuristic is proposed.