Convex Optimization Based Relay Node Placement for Wi-Fi Mesh Networks
Hongchun Li, Jie Wu, Yi Xu, Junfang Tian · 2018
Wi-Fi Mesh Networks (WMNs) have flexible network structure and support high-volume data traffic. A WMN can be instantly set up to provide networking service for various applications. Relay node placement is a key problem during network design. To design a WMN, it is necessary to consider both network cost and network performance. The Wi-Fi system supports diverse transmission rates in MAC layer, which makes it more challenging to select relay node positions in WMNs while ensuring network performance. In this paper, we propose a Convex Optimization based Relay Node Placement (CO-RNP) method, which formalizes relay node placement as a convex optimization problem. CO-RNP reduces relay node number by minimizing the length of non-routing links and preserves network performance by constraining the length of routing links. We evaluate the performance of networks designed by CO-RNP with network simulations in ns-3. The simulation results suggest that our method achieves effective balance between network cost and network performance.