Joint AP Placement and Channel Assignment Algorithm for 802.11 Wireless LANs

To deploy a multi-cell 802.11 wireless LAN system, Access Point(AP) placement and channel assignment are two primaiy design issues. For a given set of traffic demands, maximizing not only the overall system throughput, but also the fairness in resource sharing among users are aimed at, which is measured by a throughput balance index. Unlike conventional approaches that decouple AP placement and channel assignment into two phases, jointly solving the two problems for better performance is proposed. Due to the high computational complexity involved in the exhaustive searching, an efficient local searching algorithm, called patching algorithm, is designed. The simulation results show that for a typical indoor environment, patching algorithm can provide a close-to-optimal performance with much lower time complexity than the exhaustive searching.