Optimizing WLAN radio coverage

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are spreading all over the planet with impressive speed and market penetration. They will replace traditional indoor wired local networks and allow flexible access outdoor, eventually competing with classical cellular systems (GSM, GPRS, UMTS, etc.) in the provision of wireless services. Although the small systems currently installed are planned using rules of thumb, their rapid spread and size increase requires quantitative methods to determine proper access points (AP) positioning. Previously proposed approaches to the coverage planning neglect the effect of the IEEE802.11 access mechanism, which limits system capacity when access points coverage areas overlap. Here we propose a new modelling approach that directly accounts system capacity and show that the resulting optimization problems of WLAN coverage planning can be seen as extensions of the classical set covering or maximum coverage problems. We present and discuss different formulations based on quadratic and hyperbolic objective functions and report some preliminary results on synthetic instances we generated.