Efficient Wireless Extension Point Placement Algorithm in Urban Rectilineal WLANs

With a small amount of software modification, wireless extension points (EPs), which are now commercially available, can be used to improve the throughput capacity of a wireless local area network (WLAN). An EP is an immobile device that has access to the power supply or is equipped with a high-capacity battery but does not have direct access to the Internet. They wirelessly relay data between the access point and the mobile hosts. In this paper, we investigate the optimal placement of the EPs such that the throughput capacity of an urban rectilineal WLAN can be maximized. Two channel models that are based on the Shannon capacity bound and IEEE 802.11 specifications are studied. We first formulate a solution for the optimal EP placement problem in a general network scenario as a nonlinear programming problem; then, we propose an efficient algorithm that determines the optimal locations of a fixed number of EPs in a rectilineal network. Our results show that, for a wide range of system parameters, the optimally placed EPs can significantly increase the network throughput capacity. Moreover, we study how the number of EPs, transmission power, path loss exponent, channel models, and traffic characteristics affect the optimal EP placement and expected throughput capacity of the network.