An Interface for Simulating Node Placement in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are currently attracting a lot of attention from wireless research and technology communities due to their ability for providing cost-effective broadband wireless connectivity. WMNs are showing their usefulness to development and deployment of medical, transport and surveillance applications in urban areas, metropolitan, neighbouring communities and municipal area networks. The efficient deployment and performance of such networks largely depends on the placement of mesh router nodes. At the design phase, the objective is thus to compute positions of mesh routers so as to optimize some WMN metrics, such as establishing network connectivity and achieving maximum client coverage. In this work we present a web interface for simulating the node placement in WMNs. Besides the usual benefits of running the interface remotely from any web browser, the advantages of the simulation tool are many fold. Indeed, by using the interface, we can simulate different mesh client node positions, different radio coverage for mesh router nodes, different number of mesh routers, different number of mesh clients, etc. We can also answer to different questions such as: do we need more mesh routers to cover all clients in the deployment area? Additionally, we can study the performance of different resolution methods such as local search methods (Hill Climbing, Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search) and population-based methods (Genetic Algorithms) under different distributions of mesh client nodes.