Placement of access points in wireless local area networks

The use of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) in telecommunications can be found in offices, homes, factories, mobile robots and/or environments where physical wiring may be problematic. As the cost of advanced technology continues to drop and various standards have been established, the future trend of wireless communications appears to be very promising. There are basic design elements in WLAN architecture to provide good service for the users like locations, number and transmission power of the Access Point (AP), also known as Base Stations (BSs). The number of deployed stations has a direct impact on the cost of the WLAN. Moreover, the intercell interference is affected by the number of APs and their locations. It is, therefore, always desirable to minimize the number of stations needed to achieve the required Quality of Service (QoS).; Conventionally, it is the network planner's task to manually choose locations and parameters of APs based on prior experience. This manual approach is highly inefficient and time consuming. For this purpose, automatic network planning can substantially reduce the overhead cost of the network, minimize the intercell interference and maximize the QoS. In this work we propose a new placement technique for WLAN APs based on well-known 2-D convolution. The objective of the placement problem is to cover the whole area with minimum number of base stations.; In this thesis, the placement problem is formulated. The proposed solution is then described in details. Simulation results of the proposed solution show its efficiency in handling the placement process. The convolution substantially reduced the complexity of the problem making it feasible to solve. Furthermore, the developed algorithm can deal with arbitrary propagation and demand patterns, using simple graphical interface.