Adding Capacity Points to a Wireless Mesh Network Using Local Search

Abstract— Wireless mesh network deployments are popular as a cost-effective means to provide broadband connectivity to large user populations. As the network usage grows, network planners need to evolve an existing mesh network to provide additional capacity. In this paper, we study the problem of adding new capacity points (e.g., gateway nodes) to an existing mesh network. We first present a new technique for calculating gateway-limited fair capacity as a function of the contention at each gateway. Then, we present two online gateway placement algorithms that use local search operations to maximize the capacity gain on an existing network. A key challenge is that each gateway’s capacity depends on the locations of other gateways and cannot be known in advance of determining a gateway placement. We address this challenge with two placement algorithms with different approaches to estimating the unknown gateway capacities. Our first placement algorithm, MinHopCount, is adapted from...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Joshua Robinson, Mustafa Uysal, Ram Swaminathan, Edward W. Knightly
• Keywords: Communications, Gateway Placements, INFOCOM 2008, Mesh Network, Placement Algorithms