Measurement Based Impromptu Deployment of a Multi-Hop Wireless Relay Network

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal sequential deployment strategy for multi-hop wireless relay networks along a line, minimizing power consumption or maximum power, with policies derived via Markov decision processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel MDP-based framework for impromptu relay deployment along a line, considering multiple objectives and relay communication strategies.

Findings

Optimal deployment policies are derived for different objectives.

Relay placement strategies depend on channel measurements and objectives.

Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the policies.

Abstract

We study the problem of optimal sequential ("as-you-go") deployment of wireless relay nodes as a person walks along a line of random length (with a known distribution). The objective is to create an impromptu multihop wireless network for connecting a packet source to be placed at the end of the line with a sink node located at the starting point, to operate in the light traffic regime. As the deployment person walks along the line from the sink towards the source, at every step, he measures the channel quality to one (or more) previously placed relays, and places the relay nodes based on these measurements, so as to minimize either the sum power or the maximum power from the source to the sink node in the resultant network, subject to a constraint on the expected number of relays placed. For each of these two objectives, two different relay selection strategies are considered: (i) each relay communicates with the sink via its immediate previous relay, (ii) the communication path can skip some of the deployed relays. With appropriate modeling assumptions, we formulate each of these problems as a Markov decision process (MDP). We provide the optimal policy structures for all these cases, and provide illustrations, via numerical results, for some typical parameters.