Modeling and performance study of AP placement framework for indoor location-awareness and network performance

Abstract

This paper presents an AP (Access Point) placement framework considering indoor location-awareness and AP-based WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks) performance enhancement. We first develop four objective functions that yield objective goals significant to the optimal AP placement in terms of location-awareness and network performance factors. Then, we develop three meta-heuristic algorithms based on simulated annealing, tabu search, and genetic algorithm. These algorithms generate a near-optimal solution for a given objective function. The performance of the AP placement framework presented in this paper is measured under the environments simulating indoor spaces, and numerical results obtained by experimental evaluation of proposed objective functions and algorithms confirm that the proposed AP placement framework can achieve a near-optimal solution to a given objective function.