5 research outputs found
An efficient genetic algorithm for large-scale planning of robust industrial wireless networks
An industrial indoor environment is harsh for wireless communications
compared to an office environment, because the prevalent metal easily causes
shadowing effects and affects the availability of an industrial wireless local
area network (IWLAN). On the one hand, it is costly, time-consuming, and
ineffective to perform trial-and-error manual deployment of wireless nodes. On
the other hand, the existing wireless planning tools only focus on office
environments such that it is hard to plan IWLANs due to the larger problem size
and the deployed IWLANs are vulnerable to prevalent shadowing effects in harsh
industrial indoor environments. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an
overdimensioning model and a genetic algorithm based over-dimensioning (GAOD)
algorithm for deploying large-scale robust IWLANs. As a progress beyond the
state-of-the-art wireless planning, two full coverage layers are created. The
second coverage layer serves as redundancy in case of shadowing. Meanwhile, the
deployment cost is reduced by minimizing the number of access points (APs); the
hard constraint of minimal inter-AP spatial paration avoids multiple APs
covering the same area to be simultaneously shadowed by the same obstacle. The
computation time and occupied memory are dedicatedly considered in the design
of GAOD for large-scale optimization. A greedy heuristic based
over-dimensioning (GHOD) algorithm and a random OD algorithm are taken as
benchmarks. In two vehicle manufacturers with a small and large indoor
environment, GAOD outperformed GHOD with up to 20% less APs, while GHOD
outputted up to 25% less APs than a random OD algorithm. Furthermore, the
effectiveness of this model and GAOD was experimentally validated with a real
deployment system
An efficient genetic algorithm for large-scale transmit power control of dense and robust wireless networks in harsh industrial environments
The industrial wireless local area network (IWLAN) is increasingly dense, due to not only the penetration of wireless applications to shop floors and warehouses, but also the rising need of redundancy for robust wireless coverage. Instead of simply powering on all access points (APs), there is an unavoidable need to dynamically control the transmit power of APs on a large scale, in order to minimize interference and adapt the coverage to the latest shadowing effects of dominant obstacles in an industrial indoor environment. To fulfill this need, this paper formulates a transmit power control (TPC) model that enables both powering on/off APs and transmit power calibration of each AP that is powered on. This TPC model uses an empirical one-slope path loss model considering three-dimensional obstacle shadowing effects, to enable accurate yet simple coverage prediction. An efficient genetic algorithm (GA), named GATPC, is designed to solve this TPC model even on a large scale. To this end, it leverages repair mechanism-based population initialization, crossover and mutation, parallelism as well as dedicated speedup measures. The GATPC was experimentally validated in a small-scale IWLAN that is deployed a real industrial indoor environment. It was further numerically demonstrated and benchmarked on both small- and large-scales, regarding the effectiveness and the scalability of TPC. Moreover, sensitivity analysis was performed to reveal the produced interference and the qualification rate of GATPC in function of varying target coverage percentage as well as number and placement direction of dominant obstacles. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved