Fast, Effective Transmitter Placement in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

W ireless mesh networks are systems of interconnected wireless access points that provide digital services to client devices via radio transmission. We consider the challenges of a communications planner who must quickly design a wireless mesh network, as might be expected during combat operations or in support of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations. We seek a network that maximizes client coverage area subject to constraints on network service, the technical characteristics of the available access points, and radio propagation over terrain. We create a nondifferentiable, nonconvex, nonlinear optimization problem and use a sampling algorithm to quickly find good solutions. We validate our formulation and solutions via numerical experiments and several field tests, and we demonstrate that our technique can generate network topologies capable of functioning in real-world scenarios.We construct a corresponding decision support tool that allows a communications planner to design working wireless mesh network topologies quickly, with no guesswork, and requiring very little expertise. The tool runs on a laptop, supports virtually any type of access point, uses terrain information freely downloadable from the Internet, and does not require any additional software or solver licenses.

Designing Interference-Robust Wireless Mesh Networks Using a Defender-Attacker-Defender Model

“…Building on the software we initially developed for Nicholas (2009), we implement our algorithm for solving the SRRA+C DAD problem using Microsoft Visual C++. Our decision support tool runs on a laptop, does not require commercial solvers or other add-ins, and can use terrain information freely downloaded from the Internet.…”

“…In our previous work (Nicholas & Alderson, 2012) Our work can be viewed as a merger of the attacker-operator formulation of Shankar (2008) and the designer-operator formulation of Nicholas and Alderson (2012).…”

“…We begin by describing the operator's problem, a method of calculating the value of a WMN physical topology given fixed AP and jammer locations. Building on the notation of Nicholas and Alderson (2012), we define N to be the set of all AP nodes, indexed by i = 1, 2,…, n, where n N = . We define M to be the set of all jammer nodes, We define the operating area as the topographic area where an AP i or jamming source k may be physically located.…”

“…We use the same approach to solve the problem using the subgradient method (Bertsekas, 1999), stopping after a given number of iterations. See Nicholas and Alderson (2012) and Nicholas (2009) for further details on our SRRA solution technique.…”

“…This property of WMNs make them well-suited to operations in austere environments, such as combat and humanitarian assistance disaster relief (HA/DR) operations. See Nicholas (2009) for an introduction to WMNs.…”