Measurement and Optimisation of AP Placement and Channel Assignment in Wireless LAN

Abstract

Wireless local area network (WLAN) planning is a vital phase, and the design of WLAN needs to be planned well to deliver higher data rates, maximum coverage and best service for users. The prediction of how the system components will perform is a significant step when planning to design a digital system. Unlike other systems, quantifying the range of performance of WLAN systems can be difficult due to the impact of the indoor environment on RF signals. Therefore, the most significant deployment decisions are the ones that are related to the placement of access points (APs) and channel assignment. This project mainly focuses on optimising Wi-Fi systems in indoor environments. Therefore, a planning tool ‘iBuildNet’, along with a modified simulating annealing algorithm, are proposed to find the optimal AP placement and assign non-overlapped channels to them by considering load balancing among APs and channel interference for user traffic demand. The optimisation objectives are to reduce the number of APs and minimise the total pathloss caused by obstructions. It can be seen in the simulation results that the methods used led to obtaining the optimal AP positions and meeting the objectives.