The joint Gateway Placement and Spatial Reuse Problem in Wireless Mesh Networks

A Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is composed of multiple Access Points (APs) that are connected together using the radio channel, and by a limited number of gateway APs connected to the Internet. In this paper, we address the problem of gateways placement, that consists of minimizing the number of gateways while satisfying performance requirements of the APs. Along with the placement problem, the formulation includes the jointly routing and scheduling to account for the problem of interference and to enable spacial reuse. The problem, that we coined GPSRP, allows a much more efficient use of the available resources and reduces overall gateway costs. This article presents for the first time a mathematical formulation of the problem and discusses its advantages and limitations with respect to other approaches.