Abstract
This article addresses a real-life problem - obtaining communication links between multiple base station sites, by positioning a minimal set of fixed-access relay antenna sites on a given terrain. Reducing the number of antennas is critical, since the cost of their installation and maintenance is substantial. Despite the significant cost saving by eliminating even a single site, a hardly optimal manual approach is employed due to the computation complexity of the problem (Max-SNP-hard, as we prove in Section 3). In this paper we suggest several alternative automated heuristics, relying on terrain preprocessing to find educated potential points for positioning relay stations, then finding all the shortest paths for a Point-To-Point (P2P) case, and
finally, expanding this model to support connectivity between multiple (more than 2) base station sites. We conducted a large-scale experiment consisting of running approximately 7,000 different scenarios. We isolated and displayed the experiment factors, which we have found to affect the standard deviation between heuristics, we compared between the suggested heuristics and we show that in this experiment the saving
potential grows when more base stations are required to be interconnected. In addition, using an application we developed that allows manual positioning of relay stations on a map, we compared our suggested heuristics results to the best results obtained by human experts on a small subset of the experiment scenarios. Our studies indicate that for small networks (e.g. connecting 10 base stations), the results obtained by human experts are sufficient although rarely exceed our automated alternatives. However, the process of obtaining these results in comparison to automated heuristics is much longer. In addition, when more base station sites should be interconnected, the human approach is easily outperformed by our heuristics, both in terms of better results (fewer antennas) and in significant shorter calculation time.
finally, expanding this model to support connectivity between multiple (more than 2) base station sites. We conducted a large-scale experiment consisting of running approximately 7,000 different scenarios. We isolated and displayed the experiment factors, which we have found to affect the standard deviation between heuristics, we compared between the suggested heuristics and we show that in this experiment the saving
potential grows when more base stations are required to be interconnected. In addition, using an application we developed that allows manual positioning of relay stations on a map, we compared our suggested heuristics results to the best results obtained by human experts on a small subset of the experiment scenarios. Our studies indicate that for small networks (e.g. connecting 10 base stations), the results obtained by human experts are sufficient although rarely exceed our automated alternatives. However, the process of obtaining these results in comparison to automated heuristics is much longer. In addition, when more base station sites should be interconnected, the human approach is easily outperformed by our heuristics, both in terms of better results (fewer antennas) and in significant shorter calculation time.
| Original language | English GB |
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| State | Published - 2004 |
Publication series
| Name | Report, Ben-Gurion University |
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