Cost-effective placement of mesh nodes in wireless mesh networks

Placement of mesh nodes is an important and challenging issue in the research of wireless mesh networks (WMNs). It is important that the placement occurs after careful network planning, in order to minimize deployment cost while satisfying the requirements of network performance. In this paper, we study the problem of cost-effective node placement (CeNP) in WMNs. First of all, we define the objective functions and constraint conditions in the CeNP problem, and formulate this problem as an integer linear programming issue. Then, we propose an efficient method called CeNP LSA, i.e., jointing MAP location, GW selection and MR addition. Three corresponding heuristic algorithms, namely, MSC-based coverage algorithm, weighted clustering algorithm and GW-rooted tree pruning algorithm, are developed so that the deployment cost is minimized and the constraints are satisfied. Finally, the performance of CeNP LSA is evaluated by simulations, and the results show that the proposed algorithms are highly effective for strategically placing mesh nodes in WMNs.