Movement control of APs constituting a mesh network considering AP movement constraints

Abstract

We propose a relay AP movement control method for ad-hoc networks where the APs constitute a mobile infrastructure that responds to hotspot position changes under movement constraints. The proposed method moves the relay AP to an optimal position while considering the constraints of movable position. We consider a virtual spring to the spring model to apply the movement constraints. The proposed method uses a spring model after placing virtual terminals and APs at positions symmetrical to the axis of the movement of the relay AP. We evaluated the proposed method assuming a mesh network with terminals along roads. To clarify the impact of the road widths, we varied the road width and the amount of terminal traffic from the initial placement for our evaluation. This is because the effect of road width cannot be ignored due to the short transmission distance of IEEE802.11. The position of terminal movement in the spring model highly depends on the overflow conditions of the communication link. The evaluation results showed that the throughput degradation from the optimum position is reduced by 24% compared to the extended conventional method, which moves the terminal freely and then moves it within the movement constraint when the road width is 23 m. Compared to the optimal position, the proposed method degraded the throughput by about 8% and achieved near-optimal relay AP movement control.