Long distance wireless mesh network planning
Sayandeep Sen, Bhaskaran Raman · 2007
Several research efforts as well as deployments have chosen IEEE802.11 as a low-cost, long-distance access technology to bridge the digital divide. In this paper, we consider the important issue of planning such networks to the minimize system cost. This is a non-trivial task since it involves several sets of variables: the network topology, tower heights, antenna types to be used and the irorientations, and radio transmit powers. The task is further complicated due to the presence of network performance constraints, and the inter-dependence among the variables. Our first contribution in this paper is the formulation of this problem in terms of the variables, constraints and the optimization criterion. Our second contribution is in identifying the dependencies among the variables and breaking-down the problem into four tractable sub-parts. In this process, we extensively use domain knowledge to strike a balance between tractability and practicality.