Fast, Effective Transmitter Placement in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract : Wireless mesh networks are systems of interconnected wireless access points that provide digital services to client devices via radio transmission. We consider the challenges of a communications planner who must quickly design a wireless mesh network, as might be expected during combat operations or in support of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations. We seek a network that maximizes client coverage area subject to constraints on network service, the technical characteristics of the available access points, and radio propagation over terrain. We create a nondifferentiable, nonconvex nonlinear optimization problem and use a sampling algorithm to quickly find good solutions. We validate our formulation and solutions via numerical experiments and several field tests, and we demonstrate that our technique can generate network topologies capable of functioning in real-world scenarios. We construct a corresponding decision support tool that allows a communications planner to design working wireless mesh network topologies quickly, with no guesswork and requiring very little expertise. The tool runs on a laptop, supports virtually any type of access point, uses terrain information freely downloadable from the Internet, and does not require any additional software or solver licenses.