A heuristic approach for antenna positioning in cellular networks

The antenna-positioning problem concerns finding a set of sites for antenna s 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 valu es for each of the antenna parameters. All these choices must satisfy a set of imperative constraints and optimize a set of objectives. This paper pre sents a heuristic approach for tackling this complex and highly combinatori al problem. The proposed approach is composed of three phases: a constraint -based pre-processing phase to filter out bad configurations, an optimizati on phase using tabu search, and a post-optimization phase to improve soluti ons given by tabu search. To validate the approach, computational results a re presented using large and realistic data sets.