Mesh Router Nodes placement in Rural Wireless Mesh Networks

The problem of placement of mesh router nodes in Wireless Mesh Networks is known to be a NP hard problem. In this paper, the problem is addressed under a constraint of network model tied to rural regions where we usually observe low density and sparse population. We consider the area to cover as decomposed into a set of elementary areas which can be required or optional in terms of coverage and where a node can be placed or not. We propose an effective algorithm to ensure the coverage. This algorithm is based on metropolis approach. We evaluated the proposed algorithm on an instance network. A close to 100 percent coverage with an optimal number of routers showed the efficiency of our approach for the mesh router node placement problem. MOTS-CLÉS : Réseaux maillés sans fil, Placement de nœud routeur maillé, Metropolis.