Wireless network design: a space-filling curve approach

Abstract

Wireless networks have experienced rapid adoption in recent years. Although installing a small wireless network is relatively easy, deploying a large-scale enterprise wireless infrastructure requires careful planning, so as to minimise cost while meeting various Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Existing research has mainly focused on formulating simpler mathematical models or finding solution approaches. The major difficulty in these methods is in the numerous measurements, of signal strengths between possible user and base-station (or access point) locations, required to provide the input data. In this paper, we propose an efficient Space-Filling Curve (SFC)-based heuristic for solving the network design problem. The SFC heuristic is easy to implement, fast in execution and can provide good first-cut solutions. Most importantly, the SFC's property of preserving 'nearness' among points makes the solution feasible and sound, and thereby reduces the signal strength measurements effort needed.