Gateway Deployment optimization in Cellular Wi-Fi Mesh Networks

Abstract

With the standardization of IEEE 802.11, there has been an explosive growth of wireless local area networks (WLAN). Recently, this cost effective technology is being developed aggressively for establishing metro-scale “cellular Wi-Fi” network to support seamless Internet access in the urban area. We envision a large scale WLAN system in the future where Access Points (APs) will be scattered over an entire city enabling people to use their mobile devices ubiquitously. The problem addressed in this paper involves finding the minimum number of gateways and their optimal placement so as to minimize the network installation costs while maintaining reliability, flexibility and an acceptable grade of service. The problem is modeled taking a network graph, where the nodes represents either the Access Points of IEEE 802.11 or wired backbone gateways. In this paper, we present two methods (1) an innovative approach using integer linear programming (ILP) for gateway selection in the cellular Wi-Fi network, and (2) a completely new heuristic (OPEN/CLOSE) to solve the gateway selection problem. In the ILP model, we developed a set of linear inequalities based on various constraints. The ILP model is solved by using lp-solve, a simplex-based software for linear and integer programming problems. The second approach is an OPEN/CLOSE heuristic, tailored for cellular Wi-Fi, which arrives at a sub-optimal solution. Java programming language is used for simulation in OPEN/CLOSE heuristic. Extensive simulations are carried out for performance evaluation. Simulation results show that the proposed approaches can effectively identify a set of gateways at optimal locations in a cellular Wi-Fi network, resulting in an overall cost reduction of up to 50%. The technique presented in this paper is generalized and can be used for gateway selection for other networks as well.