Efficient AP Placement Through Power Control and Partially Overlapping Channel Assignment

Abstract

Deploying the access points (APs) at appropriate locations and a proper frequency assignment to them are the two crucial design parameters of 802.11 WLAN. An unplanned placement of APs may not select the appropriate locations resulting a reduced transmission coverage. Furthermore, limited availability of frequency channels in 802.11 WLAN significantly restricts the simultaneous transmissions on nearby APs. Therefore frequency planning at a post deployment phase may cause a significant cost overhead since all the APs may not be selected to operate due to increased channel interference. In this paper we jointly address the issue of efficient AP placement and frequency assignment by considering two important parameters such as power tuning and partially overlapping channel (POC) assignment. Based on these two parameters we first design an AP placement model and formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) for the same. We then propose an efficient greedy algorithm and analyze its performance with respect to other existing approaches. Extensive computer simulations have been performed to establish the novelty of the proposed approach. It has also been shown that the proposed approach is highly comparable to other existing approaches.