An Efficient Strategy with High Availability for Dynamic Provisioning of Access Points in Large-Scale Wireless Networks

The dynamical users' association with wireless access points and the requirement for maximum network coverage foster the challenge of providing energy efficiency alongside network availability for large-scale wireless networks. This paper proposes an access-point provisioning strategy based on a multi-objective optimization heuristic. The heuristic purposes are maximizing coverage, ensuring high network availability, and minimizing the number of active access points, while improving energy efficiency. We evaluate our proposal by simulating a connected component of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF - Brazil) wireless network, comprising 363 access points in a university campus. The simulation considers actual flows and features of users' association to the network. The results show that the best performing strategy is a greedy heuristic, which activates access points with the most significant number of potential neighbors that are not active. Our proposal implies 2% of unserved users while activating only 23% of the access points, ensuring high availability and energy efficiency.