Optimizing the Internet Gateway Deployment in a Wireless Mesh Network

In a wireless mesh network (WMN), mesh routers (MRs) are interconnected by wireless links and form a wireless backbone to provide ubiquitous high-speed Internet connectivity for mobile clients. The wireless backbone is tightly integrated with the Internet by nodes called as Internet gateways (IGWs). In this paper, we address the IGW deployment problem which is shown to be NP-hard. We first formulate it as a linear program (LP) issue, then develop two heuristic algorithms for the purpose of cost-efficient IGW deployment. We further compare our algorithms with a leading approach by extensive simulations. Our analysis shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.