A wireless local area network modeling tool for scalable indoor access point placement optimization

When considering a new wireless local area network (WLAN) deployment a designer must consider many and often conflicting design metrics including environment configuration, coverage constraints, frequency assignment, co-channel interference, user demands on the WLAN, application types, number of access points and their position when undertaking a design. The multitude of factors that influence the performance of a WLAN highlights the challenge facing a designer to achieve a reliable and robust network design particularly for large deployments. It also emphasizes the need for a software tool that automatically and intuitively models a WLAN based on user specified demands. The research presented will describe such a network modeling, design, and evaluation tool that has been developed to aid designers when undertaking the difficult task of WLAN design and also used as a simulation test bed to evaluate various models such as propagation models, optimization approaches. The paper will particularly focus on the evaluation of a scalable optimization algorithm in the design tool that can be used to automatically optimize the number of access points required and their position to meet site specific demands in indoor environments.