Improved approximations for the Steiner tree problem
SODA selected papers from the third annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
A threshold of ln n for approximating set cover (preliminary version)
STOC '96 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Approximating shortest paths on a convex polytope in three dimensions
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Constructing Approximate Shortest Path Maps in Three Dimensions
SIAM Journal on Computing
A 1.598 approximation algorithm for the Steiner problem in graphs
Proceedings of the tenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Combinatorial optimization algorithms for radio network planning
Theoretical Computer Science
Radio Propagation in Cellular Networks
Radio Propagation in Cellular Networks
Tabu Search for Frequency Assignment in Mobile Radio Networks
Journal of Heuristics
A Heuristic Approach for Antenna Positioning in Cellular Networks
Journal of Heuristics
RNC-Approximation Algorithms for the Steiner Problem
STACS '97 Proceedings of the 14th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
Approximation algorithms for the watchman route and zookeeper's problems
Discrete Applied Mathematics - The 1st cologne-twente workshop on graphs and combinatorial optimization (CTW 2001)
Tighter Bounds for Graph Steiner Tree Approximation
SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics
Optimal location of transmitters for micro-cellular radio communication system design
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Efficient viewshed computation on terrain in external memory
Geoinformatica
More efficient terrain viewshed computation on massive datasets using external memory
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
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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 relay antenna sites is considered critical due to substantial installation and maintenance costs. Despite the significant cost saved by eliminating even a single antenna site, an inefficient manual approach is employed due to the computational complexity of the problem. From the theoretical point of view we show that this problem is not only NP hard, but also does not have a constant approximation. In this paper we suggest several alternative automated heuristics, relying on terrain preprocessing to find educated potential points for positioning relay stations. A large-scale computer-based experiment consisting of approximately 7,000 different scenarios was conducted. The quality of alternative solutions was compared by isolating and displaying factors that were found to affect the standard deviation of the solutions supplied by the tested heuristics. The results of the simulation based experiments show that the saving potential increases when more base stations are needed to be interconnected. The designs of a human expert were compared to the automatically generated solutions for a small subset of the experiment scenarios. Our studies indicate that for small networks (e.g., connecting up to ten base stations), the results obtained by human experts are adequate although they rarely exceed the quality of automated alternatives. However, the process of obtaining these results in comparison to automated heuristics is longer. In addition, when more base station sites need to be interconnected, the human approach is easily outperformed by our heuristics, both in terms of better results (fewer antennas) and in significant shorter calculation times.