BalloonNet: A Deploying Method for a Three-Dimensional Wireless Network Surrounding a Building

Aiming at fast establishment of a wireless network around a multi-level building in a disaster area, we propose an efficient method to determine the locations of network nodes in the air. Nodes are attached to balloons outside a building and deployed in the air so that the network can be accessed from anywhere in the building. In this paper, we introduce an original radio propagation model for predicting path loss from an outdoor position to a position inside a building. In order to address the three-dimensional deployment problem, the proposed method optimizes an objective function for satisfying two goals: (1) guarantee the coverage: the target space needs to be covered by over a certain percentage by wireless network nodes, (2) minimize the number of network nodes. For solving this problem, we propose an algorithm based on a genetic algorithm. To evaluate the proposed method, we compared our method with three benchmark methods, and the results show that the proposed method requires fewer nodes than other methods.