A Novel Transmitter Placement Scheme Based on Hierarchical Simplex Search for Indoor Wireless Coverage Optimization

A novel transmitter placement scheme is developed to aid indoor wireless coverage system design. The objectives are first to find the least number of transmitters to achieve the desired coverage ratio and then to optimize their locations to maximize the average received power. The proposed scheme includes two stages. The first stage uses an iterative heuristic search (IHS) method to achieve the first objective; while the second stage applies a modified simplex search method to achieve the second objective without compromising the first one. In IHS, we propose an adaptive number adjustment algorithm (ANA) to speed up the search process, which adjusts the number of transmitters with variable step-sizes. A hierarchical simplex search (HSS) algorithm is proposed for transmitter location optimization, which can produce near-optimal transmitter placement. The experimental results show our method outperforms existing peer ones, including the exhaustive enumeration test, manual placement and the genetic algorithm. The exhaustive enumeration test and the manual placement can achieve the desired coverage ratio, but ours uses fewer transmitters, achieves higher average received power and incurs less computation costs. Compared with the genetic algorithm, our placement can achieve higher coverage ratio and higher average received power with the same number of transmitters.