A two-stage algorithm for access point allocation in indoor environments for wireless Mesh Networks

As a flexible, inexpensive large-scale access network to the Internet, we have studied WIMNET (Wireless Internet-access Mesh NETwork). WIMNET is composed of multiple access points (APs) as wireless routers, where each AP has multihop wireless connections with others by the wireless distribution system (WDS). In WIMNET, communications between APs and the Internet gateway can become the bottleneck due to multihop link activations. Besides, the link quality in indoor environments may be degraded by obstacles such as walls. Thus, the proper allocation of APs is essential, such that the installation cost and the maximum hop count between APs should be minimized while any host in the service area must be covered by at least one AP. In this paper, we formulate this AP allocation problem in indoor environments for WIMNET, and present its two-stage heuristic algorithm composed of the initial AP allocation and the AP allocation optimization with the association host optimization. The effectiveness of our approach is verified through extensive simulations using our WIMNET simulator.