Design of Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks: Formulations and Solutions

The design/planning of WMNs is a key phase before any deployment. Few proposals can be found in the open literature that deals with the design problem; however, they do not take into account all the parameters that have an impact on the outcome of the design and they assume the existence of a physical topology where the location and the characteristics of nodes (e.g., number of channels, number of radios) are fixed.In this paper, we define a generalized model for the WMNs design problem that takes into account all the parameters that have a significant impact on the network (interference, multi-channel, transmission power, etc.), expected traffic, the constraints of the physical environment (potential locations of wireless routers and gateways), etc. To resolve the generalized model, we propose a combination of genetic and tabu search algorithms. The objective is to minimize the cost of the network and its operations while satisfying the requirements.