A study on performance of hill climbing heuristic method for router placement in wireless mesh networks

© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), also referred to as a form of wireless ad hoc network are in fact one particular type of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), whose topology can vary from a simple star network to an advanced multi-hop wireless mesh network. The main topological feature in this case is that nodes are organized in a mesh topology, making WMNs a reliable infrastructure through redundancy of multi-hop communications. The main issue of WMNs is to achieve network connectivity and stability as well as Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of user coverage. This problem is very closely related to the family of node placement problems in WMNs, among them, the mesh router mesh nodes placement. In this work we present some optimization problems in WMNs and Hill Climbing (HC) heuristic method for solving mesh router node placement near-optimally. We formulate the optimization problems using bi-objective optimization models. Thus, for the mesh router nodes placement, the bi-objective optimization problem is obtained consisting in the maximization of the size of the giant component in the mesh routers network (for measuring network connectivity) and that of user coverage. Some computational results are presented and discussed for the HC method, which is an effective local search method.