Communication is paramount, especially during a natural disaster or other emergency. Even when traditional lines of communication become unavailable, emergency response teams must be able to communicate with each other and the outside world. To facilitate this need, major cities across the United States are deploying wireless emergency networks (WENs) that serve as a secure communication channel between emergency response points (police stations, shelters, food banks, hospitals, etc.) and the outside world. An important question when designing such networks is identifying the locations within the city where access points (APs) should be placed to construct a reliable WEN. We propose a framework for identifying the optimal placement of wireless network antennas within a city, given multiple criteria constraints, and present our initial efforts to realize this framework
