A Proposal of an Active Access-Point Selection Algorithm for Wireless Mesh Networks

Junki SHIMIZU  Nobuo FUNABIKI  Toru NAKANISHI 

Publication
B - Abstracts of IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications (Japanese Edition)  Vol.J94-B  No.2  pp.264-273
Publication Date: 2011/02/01
Online ISSN: 1881-0209
Print ISSN: 1344-4697
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Student Research Building the Future of Communication Technology)
Category: 
Keyword: 
wireless mesh network,  active access point selection,  energy saving,  algorithm,  throughput, 

Full Text(in Japanese): PDF(959.3KB)

Summary: 
As a scalable, inexpensive Internet-access network, we have studied the wireless Internet-access mesh network (WIMNET) that is composed of multiple access-points (APs) connected by wireless links. WIMNET can improve the dependability to failures of links and APs by allocating APs redundantly. However, redundant APs may cause the increase of the operational cost and the degradation of the communication performance due to increasing radio wave interferences. In this paper, we formulate the active AP selection problem for selecting functioning APs for communications, and propose its heuristic algorithm. After finding the communication route using all the APs, our algorithm seeks the minimization of active APs by repeating the removal of one active AP and the check of the route existence. Through simulations using the WIMNET simulator, we show that our algorithm can drastically reduce the number of active APs, and there exists the best number of active APs in terms of the throughput.