Minimum Cost Topology Construction for Rural Wireless Mesh Networks

—IEEE 802.11 WiFi equipment based wireless mesh networks have recently been proposed as an inexpensive approach to connect far-flung rural areas. Such networks are built using high-gain directional antennas that can establish long-distance wireless point-to-point links. Some nodes in the network (called gateway nodes) are directly connected to the wired internet, and the remaining nodes connect to the gateway(s) using one or more hops. The dominant cost of constructing such a mesh network is the cost of constructing antenna towers at nodes. The cost of a tower depends on its height, which in turn depends on the length of its links and the physical obstructions along those links. We investigate the problem of selecting which links should be established such that all nodes are connected, while the cost of constructing the antenna towers required to establish the selected links is minimized. We show that this problem is NPhard and that a better than O(log n) approximation cannot be exp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Debmalya Panigrahi, Partha Dutta, Sharad Jaiswal, K. V. M. Naidu, Rajeev Rastogi
• Keywords: Antenna Towers, Approximation Algorithm, Communications, INFOCOM 2008, Mesh Network