Fault-tolerant base station planning of Wireless Mesh Networks in dynamic industrial environments

Wireless Mesh Networks are infrastructure networks with a wireless multi-hop backbone. In this paper we present an innovative algorithm for fault-tolerant base station planning in wireless mesh networks. The algorithm determines a close-to-minimal number and the positions of base stations to be installed such that the radio coverage is correct in the presence of faults (base station crash or link outage). The algorithm considers both the connectivity of the multi-hop backbone and the connectivity of the mobile stations. The presented algorithm produces correct results, in limited number of iterations under realistic network size and in acceptable time. The provided fault-tolerance is sufficient in most practical situations.