Cost-Performance Planning of Municipal Wireless Access Networks

Planning Municipal Wireless Access Networks is a challenging task, since many optimization choices must be taken into account in large metropolitan areas and, in turn, the number of free variables is very large, on the order of several millions, if the position of wireless access points is to be optimized, as well as their connection to the backbone network. This paper formalizes the problem of choosing appropriate access points’ locations and to connect the so built wireless access network to the backbone network. We provide an optimization algorithm able to find a solution with a fast heuristic approach, and apply it to a real-world scenario about a 51 km area of Milano (Italy). The proposed heuristic solution is compared with the result of a simulated-annealing-based optimization algorithm and the result is that the cost of the solutions of the heuristic algorithm is larger than that of the optimal solution by a few percents.