Optimal Design of Broadband Wireless Mesh Networks

Design/planning of WMNs is the key phase before any deployment. Few proposals can be found in the open literature that deal with the design problem; moreover, they do not take into account all the parameters that have an impact on the outcome of the design and they assume the existence of a physical topology where the location and the characteristics of nodes (e.g., number of channels, number of radios) are fixed. In this paper, we define a generalized model for the WMNs design problem that takes into account all the parameters that have a significant impact on the network (interference, multi-channel, transmission power, etc.), the requirements of providers (expected amount of traffic/users), the constraints of the physical environment (potential locations of wireless routers, e.g., poles, and gateways, e.g., data centers), etc. The objective is to minimize the cost of the network and its operations while satisfying the requirements. The proposed model is shown to outperform considerably existing solutions.