• wlan
• rate
• wireless
• robust optimization

This Thesis aims to evaluate robust optimization under users mobility and rate uncertainty in Dense WLANs; this work is a continuation of what has already begun by A. Massida. In that Thesis, he shall exploit the robust optimization paradigm to deal with uncertainty aspects in real application contexts, such as the Green WLAN. The concept of Local Area Network is the rst step to the WLANs, which introduce the use of mobile devices and, as a consequence,
the deployment of this kind of infrastructure. These networks are implemented with several
access points (APs) that provide wireless connectivity to user terminals (UTs) located in
the area. In this scenario, it is possible to switch off some APs guaranteeing the same
UTs coverage as if the network was working at full power. The idea is to connect UTs to
the minimum number of APs, in order to power off some of them to save energy. This
problem must take into account two uncertain factors, like wireless instability and user
mobility; hence, we should take into account that users roam across the service area. This
last feature has a notable impact to channel capacity, which in turn strongly depends on
the UT-AP distance. The models described in this work are evaluated exploiting CPLEX
solver, it enables rapid development and deployment of decision optimization models using
mathematical and constraint programming. First of all, we investigate the problem of switch
off some APs to minimize power consumption in dense WLANs, granting power savings.
The just mentioned problem can be formulated as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and
solved by CPLEX. Anyway, we can have diffculties to solve this problem in short amount of
time, as required in real WLAN environments; a proper setting of CPLEX parameters can
help us to compute solutions in a reasonable time with reasonable power savings. Then we
investigate a heuristic to manipulate the number of access points that are not switched off,
and finally, we implement a simple reallocation algorithm to increase the number of feasible
future solutions after CPLEX evaluation.