Mesh router placement exploiting obstacles for mitigating interference

Abstract

The performance (such as throughput) of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are affected by many factors such as routing protocols and interferences. To improve the throughput, several studies have proposed efficient routing protocols to find better paths and new link state metrics to accurately represent the wireless link qualities. Most of these works assume that the locations of the mesh routers are pre-defined. In this paper, we propose a mesh router placement scheme based on genetic algorithm accounting for dynamic location for all the mesh routers, and indoor obstacles that can minimize the interferences among the mesh routers. Through extensive simulations, we find that the existence of obstacles such as walls can be exploited to decrease the interferences to improve the performance of the indoor wireless mesh networks. We show that the proposed scheme improves the performance by 30-40% compared to the random selection scheme. Furthermore, the existence of walls improves the performance by as much as 50% compared to the cases without walls. © 2011 IEEE.