Minimizing cost of placement of multi-radio and multi-power-level access points with rate adaptation in indoor environment

This paper addresses the AP placement problem in an indoor environment. Given a set of clients (end users) and their locations, each client has a traffic demand for Internet access. An AP can be equipped with one radio, dual radios, or even three radios (all for client access). Each AP can adjust its transmission power according to its local environment. The problem of our concern is to find out the optimal placement of APs such that the total cost of all APs is minimized, subject to the constraint that the traffic demand for each client can be fulfilled. The cost of an AP includes the cost of the AP box and the cost of radios installed on it. We proposed a heuristic algorithm that initially places an AP at each client location and gradually merges two neighboring APs into one AP until no further merging can be made due to bandwidth constraint. Simulation results show the heuristic algorithm can significantly reduce the total APs' cost, compared with other heuristic methods. © 2011 IEEE.