Wireless LAN Access Point Location Planning

With the fast-growing demand for mobile services, where to place the access points (APs) for providing uniformly and appropriately distributed signals in a wireless local area network (WLAN) becomes an important issue in the wireless network planning. Basically, AP placement will affect the coverage and strength of signals in a WLAN. The number and locations of APs in a WLAN are often decided on the basis of the trial-and-error method. Based on this method, the network planner first selects suitable locations to place APs through observation, and then keeps changing the locations to improve the signal strength based on the received signal. Such process is complicated, laborious and time-consuming. To overcome this problem, we investigate the back-propagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm to improve over the traditional trial-and-error method. Without increasing the number of APs, our approach only needs to adjust AP locations to overcome weak signal problems and thus increase the signal coverage for the Internet connection anywhere within the area. In our experiment, we established a WLAN on a C campus. Our experiments also indicate that placing APs according to the BPNN provided better signal coverage and met the students’ demands for connecting to the Internet from anywhere in the classroom.