Joint Access Point Placement and Channel Assignment for 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks

Abstract

To deploy a multi-cell IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN), access point (AP) placement and channel assignment are two primary design issues. For a given pattern of traffic demands, we aim at maximizing not only the overall system throughput, but also the fairness in resource sharing among mobile terminals. A novel method for estimating the system throughput of a multi-cell WLAN is proposed. An important feature of this method is that cochannel overlapping is allowed. Unlike conventional approaches that decouple AP placement and channel assignment into two phases, we propose to solve the two problems jointly for better performance. Due to the high computational complexity involved in exhaustive searching, an efficient local searching algorithm, called patching algorithm, is also designed. Numerical results show that for a typical indoor environment, the patching algorithm can provide a close-to-optimal performance with much lower time complexity.