Solving the base station placement problem by means of swarm intelligence
Marcos Talau, Emílio C. G. Wille, Heitor Silvério Lopes · 2013
The base station placement problem (BSP) is characterized as the most important issue to solve in planning a wireless network. It corresponds to a constrained combinatorial optimization problem, being classified as NP-hard. This paper presents a binary PSO approach for solving BSP problems in a CDMA indoor environment (with obstructions), aiming at serving a set of users, with a minimum number of base stations. A benchmark of four maps of increasing complexity was created for testing the system. To evaluate the performance of our approach, PSO results are compared with the optimal solutions found by an exhaustive search (ES) procedure. Analytical results for a variety of problem instances suggest that the PSO algorithm presents a good tradeoff between processing times and results.