Bandwidth provisioning in infrastructure-based wireless networks employing directional antennas

Motivated by the widespread proliferation of wireless networks employing directional antennas, we study the problem of provisioning bandwidth in such networks. Given a set of subscribers and one or more access points possessing directional antennas, we formalize the problem of orienting these antennas in two fundamental settings: (i) subscriber-centric, where the objective is to fairly allocate bandwidth among the subscribers and (ii) provider-centric, where the objective is to maximize the revenue generated by satisfying the bandwidth requirements of subscribers. For both the problems, we first design algorithms for a network with only one access point working under the assumption that the number of antennas does not exceed the number of non-interfering channels. Using the well-regarded lexicographic max–min fair allocation as the objective for a subscriber-centric network, we present a dynamic programming algorithm that achieves the fairest allocation. For a provider-centric network, the allocation problem turns out to be NP-hard. We present a greedy heuristic-based algorithm that guarantees almost half of the optimum revenue. We later enhance both these algorithms to operate in more general networks with multiple access points and no restrictions on the relative numbers of antennas and channels. A simulation-based evaluation using OPNET demonstrates the efficacy of our approaches and provides us further insights into these problems.