Optimal antenna placement in multi-hop wireless networks with heterogeneous antennas

The recent advances in antenna technology have made smart beamforming antennas attractive candidates to be deployed in multi-hop wireless networks. Beamforming antennas can increase the spatial reuse of the channel and consequently the network capacity. Due to practical and economical considerations, deploying beamforming antennas in the whole network is sometimes infeasible. In this paper, we focus on multi-hop wireless networks with heterogeneous antenna capabilities. We study the problem of optimal antenna placement to maximize the total network throughput. We first introduce an antenna-aware conflict graph using the notion of virtual links. With the objective of minimizing the size of the maximum clique, we formulate our problem as a mixed-integer linear programming problem. Moreover, we propose a beamforming antenna placement heuristic algorithm for the partial deployment of beamforming antennas to upgrade existing wireless networks originally equipped with traditional omni-directional antennas. Our numerical results show that the proposed algorithm produces near-optimal results in a small fraction of time.