Optimization Models For Planning Wireless Mesh Networks: A Comparative Study

Recently, we proposed a multi-objective approach to optimize the planning of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). Unlike other approaches where the deployment cost is the pivotal concept to optimize under typical network constraints, this approach tends to simultaneously optimize the two objectives of network deployment cost and network throughput. Optimal WMN planning solutions under this approach are more realistic and much preferred by network planners in that they have to be both cost-effective and efficient (the deployment cost is minimized while the throughput is maximized). While the deployment cost objective is straightforward, the throughput objective can be viewed from different perspectives: either minimizing the aggregation of network interferences or maximizing the culmination of the flows over the entire network. Here, we propose a third perspective that maximizes the throughput by balancing the load over the network channels. We perform a thorough comparative experimental study on these three instance models with different key-parameter settings. Preliminary results presented in this paper show that this new proposed model totally supersedes the flow aggregation based model and should be used as a contender to the interference based model.