Rechargeable router placement with guaranteed QoS for green WLAN mesh networks

Nowadays, to solve the challenges of increasing energy consumption in communication networks, green mesh networks consisting of routers using renewable energy sources have been emerging as a promising solution. In this paper, we revisit the traditional router placement problem with QoS requirements and energy constraints in green WLAN Mesh Networks and introduce a new concept of failure rate to evaluate network performance. We formulate the rechargeable router placement as an optimization problem to minimize the required routers while guaranteeing the system QoS, including users´ traffic demand, routers´ energy consumption and network failure rate requirement. Furthermore, we propose a nearest cell association algorithm to reassign users to routers at different times and propose a greedy search algorithm to find approximate solutions for the router placement problem. Simulation results show that compared with the optimal placement achieved by exhaustive search, our proposed algorithm can achieve good performance with the significantly reduced computation complexity.