Single gateway placement in wireless mesh networks

Abstract—Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are increasingly becoming popular as low cost alternatives to wired network for providing broadband access to users (the last mile connectivity). In these multi-hop networks, data is forwarded to a gateway from the nodes or from the gateway to the nodes. This paper investigates the role of gateway placement on network throughput for realistic configurations of WMNs. We show that the position of the gateway significantly bears on network throughput. It is hence important to optimize its placement. Specifically, we propose several heuristics to optimally position a single gateway in WMN and compare their relative performance in terms of network throughput with respect to the exact solution, which is obtained through cumbersome computations. I