A successive refinement approach to wireless infrastructure network deployment

There has been a recent proliferation in wireless infrastructure network deployments. In a typical deployment, an installer uses either a one-time site survey or rules of thumb to place wireless access points and allocate them with channels and power levels. Because the access point location problem is inherently complex and one that requires tradeoffs among competing requirements, these approaches can result in either dead spots or significant unintended interference among wireless access points. This degrades network performance for end clients, with throughput reduction factors of 4x found in field measurements. In this paper, we take a first step towards improving client performance by coordinating choices of channels and power levels at wireless access points using a successive refinement approach. Our contributions are two-fold: first, we develop a mathematical model that crisply defines the solution space and identifies the characteristics of an optimal channel and power-level configuration. Second, we present heuristics that, under some simplifying assumptions, yield near-optimal configurations. We use Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the performance of our heuristics. We find that the choice of heuristics for transmit power control impacts performance more than the channel allocation strategy, especially at high densities. Also, surprisingly, randomly assigning channels to access points appears to be an effective strategy at higher deployment densities. Taken together, we believe that this study paves the way to designing rapidly deployable real-world infrastructure networks that also have good performance