Interference-aware gateway placement for wireless mesh networks with fault tolerance assurance

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs), as a promising technology to provide broadband Internet access, is attracting more and more attention from research community. In the research on WMN design, gateway placement is one of the most important and challenging aspects, that is, finding the optimal number and locations of gateways. Although several gateway placement approaches have been proposed, few of them consider the effect of link interference and gateway failure on network performance. In this paper, we address this issue to further optimize network performance. First of all, a tri-state interference model is defined, and on that basis, a new metric for gateway interference is proposed. Next, the gateway placement problem, which involves reducing link interference and assuring fault tolerance, is formulated as a multi-objective integer linear program issue. Then, an interference-aware and K-coverage gateway placement algorithm (IKGPA) is proposed, and a distributed fault tolerance routing mechanism is presented. Finally, the performance of our algorithm IKGPA is evaluated. Simulation results not only show the effectiveness of our algorithm, but also demonstrate that our algorithm achieves fault tolerance assurance with placing only a few additional gateways.