Deployment Strategies of Access Points for Outdoor Wireless Local Area Networks
Jane-Hwa Huang, Li‐Chun Wang, Chung‐Ju Chang · 2005
In this paper, we investigate the issues of deploying access points for wireless local area networks (WLANs) in an outdoor environment, where several adjacent access points (APs) forms a cluster and in each cluster access points are connected through wireless repeaters to ease deployment. Access points are usually placed aiming to maximize its cell coverage. Nevertheless, a larger coverage distance leads to a lower throughput for the wireless repeater. We apply the mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) optimization approach to determine the number of access points in a cluster and the best separation distance between access points. The objective is to maximize the ratio of the total carried traffic load to the total cost for a cluster of APs connected by wireless repeaters. In this paper, the uniform-spacing and the increasing-spacing placement strategies for access points are proposed and compared. Our results show that the increasing-spacing placement strategy outperforms the uniform-spacing placement strategy in terms of an objective function considering total carried traffic load, the number of access points, and the cost connecting an AP to the backbone network.