A Mesh Router Placement Scheme for Minimizing Interference in Indoor Wireless Mesh Networks

Due to the ease of deployment and the extended coverage, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are gaining popularity and research focus. For example, the routing protocols that enhance the throughput on the WMNs and the link quality measurement schemes are among the popular research topics. However, most of these works assume that the locations of the mesh routers are predetermined. Since the operators in an Indoor mesh network can determine the locations of the mesh routers by themselves, it is essential to the WMN performance for the mesh routers to be initially placed by considering the performance issues. In this paper, we propose a mesh router placement scheme based on genetic algorithms by considering the characteristics of WMNs such as interference and topology. There have been many related works that solve similar problems such as base station placement in cellular networks and gateway node selection in WMNs. However, none of them actually considers the interference to the mesh clients from non-associated mesh routers in determining the locations of the mesh routers. By simulations, we show that the proposed scheme improves the performance by 30-40% compared to the random selection scheme.