E-App: Adaptive mmWave Access Point Planning with Environmental Awareness in Wireless LANs

To enable ultra-high throughputs while addressing the potential blockage problem, maintaining an adaptive access point (AP) planning is critical to mmWave networking. By investigating the hidden interaction between the environment map and the placement of mmWave APs, we develop an adaptive AP planning (E-app) approach that can accurately sense the environment dynamics, reconstruct the obstacle map, and then predict the placements of mmWave APs adaptively. Specifically, our solution leverages mmWave radio itself to sniff the unacceptable performance degradation through sensing only a small fraction of observation points that are identified by a sparsity-aware analytical model, thereby accurately triggering a prediction module for AP positioning when necessary. Extensive evaluations show a very high prediction accuracy for our solution, which can provide around 25% improvement on user throughput performance in mmWave WLANs. This intelligent AP-planning framework well handles the environment dynamics that affect the average-case network performance, which is of utmost interest for network deployers because of its usage convenience and adaptivity.