Placement of access points in wireless local area networks

Abstract

There are basic design elements in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) architecture to provide good service for the users like locations, number and transmission power of the Access Points (APs), also known as Base Stations (BSs). The number of deployed stations has a direct impact on the cost of the WLAN. Moreover, the intercell interference is affected by the number of APs and their locations. It is, therefore, always desirable to minimize the number of stations needed to achieve the required Quality of Service (QoS). Conventionally, it is the network planner's task to manually choose locations and parameters of APs based on prior experience. This manual approach is highly inefficient and time consuming. For this purpose, automatic network planning can substantially reduce the overhead cost of the network, minimize the intercell interference and maximize the QoS. In this work we propose a new placement technique for WLAN APs based on well-known 2-D convolution. The objective of the placement problem is to cover the whole area with minimum number of access points taking into consideration the environmental features of the intended area such as radio propagation model and antenna patterns. The proposed approach shows flexibility and efficiency in this placement problem.