Future wireless networks will be characterized by heterogeneous network architectures, with multihop communication as an important aspect. It is not clear yet how much multihop communication can benefit from the use of beamforming antennas. In this paper, we control the beamforming directions of wireless devices so as to optimize the node degree, i.e., the number of neighbors a wireless device can directly communicate with. The results show the potential of beamforming antennas, and are useful benchmarks for distributed approaches in self-organizing networks.