Strategic placement of access points for message communication in a smart building environment

Abstract

We address the strategic deployment of base stations (BSs) or access points (APs) within a smart building to form ultra-dense, small-cell-based 5G or beyond 5G networks. We consider the coverage of an arbitrarily shaped service area (convex or non-convex) in an indoor environment by placing BSs/APs with varying transmit powers at appropriate locations such that every point in the indoor region under consideration will be covered by at least one BS. Towards this goal, we propose a Voronoi diagram-based BS placement framework that can completely cover a given convex/non-convex region without generating any coverage hole. Our placement technique considers the presence of different obstacles, partition walls, etc., of varying attenuation factors inside a building affecting the LOS propagation of signals in the mmWave range. Our proposed strategy simultaneously minimizes the total wastage of transmission powers of all BSs by minimizing the total area of overlapped regions and out-of-region coverages. The unique feature of our approach is that it is applicable for fully covering any convex or non-convex region in contrast to the existing coverage techniques in the literature, which are applicable only for convex regions. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing techniques for covering convex geometries in terms of the total transmission power requirement of all BSs/APs. Our proposed framework for the placement of access points will also be applicable for upcoming Wi-Fi standards such as the 802.11ad and the 802.11ay standards that can operate in the 60 GHz band.