An Adaptive Router Placement Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

Mesh router (MR) placement is one of the fundamental issues that need to be carefully addressed to provide mesh clients with satisfactory performance in a wireless mesh network (WMN). This paper proposes a virtual force based MR placement algorithm (VFPlace) which is scalable and self- adaptive. Given a certain number of MRs, VFPlace targets to determine the positions of these MRs to maximize their overall coverage and maintain a certain number of neighbors for each MR, while satisfying geographic and traffic constraints of a specific WMN. VFPlace can dynamically avoid placing MRs in prohibitive regions, favor preferential regions and balance the distance between MRs. Moreover, VFPlace can adapt the MR placement to the highly aggregated traffic load towards Internet gateways. The effectiveness of VFPlace is demonstrated through extensive simulations.