Layout Optimization for a Long Distance Wireless Mesh Network: An Industrial Case Study

In the deployment of industrial wireless network, nodes can only be deployed in some special regions due to the restriction of the environment in the factory, thus failing to effectively elude occlusions, and restricting the performance of the network. Therefore, optimization should be made for layout of the network. An optimization is made on nodes layout in this paper based on the architecture of IEEE 802.11 WIFI Long-Distance multi-hop mesh networks. The optimization objectives are the network throughput and the network construction cost with the delay of traffics as constraint. For the scene with small network size, a hierarchical traversal method is adopted to get the optimal solution; and for that with large one, a hierarchical heuristic method is proposed to get the approximate solution. Finally, we carried out experiments via simulation and the scene constructed in the actual environment of the factory. The results show that the algorithms proposed in this paper can obtain effective solutions, and the heuristic algorithm has shorter computing time.