A Chemical Reaction Algorithm to Solve the Router Node Placement in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of router node placement (WMN-RNP) in wireless mesh networks (WMN). A wireless mesh network consists of three kinds of nodes: mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways interconnected via radio links. The problem considered in this paper is the following: given a set of mesh clients deployed in a rectangular area, determine the best placement of mesh routers so that both client coverage and network connectivity are maximized. This issue is known to be NP-hard since it can be modeled as a facility location problem. To solve this issue, we propose to use a metaheuristic technique inspired from the interactions between molecules in chemical reactions to reach a low stable energy state, namely Chemical Reaction Optimization algorithm (CRO). A simulation tool has been developed to compare the performance of our CRO algorithm to the existing Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA). Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can improve client coverage by 4.5% to 18% (3% to 17% respectively) and network connectivity by 5% to 61% (4.5% to 41% respectively) when compared to GA algorithm (SA algorithm respectively).