Project Meeting

Optimizing Green Wireless LANs

We consider problems arising in the design of Green (or energy-saving) Wireless Local Area Networks (GWLANs). In this context, decisions on powering-on a set of access points, and decisions on the assignment of the user terminals to the opened access points, have to be taken simultaneously. In particular, the level of power assigned to each access point may affect, in a nonlinear way, the capacity of the connections between the access points and the user terminals that are assigned to them. The aim is to minimize the overall power consumption of the access points, which is given by a linear dependency between the power consumed and the total demand assigned to the access points, via assignment costs.

In the first part of the talk we present a Mixed Integer formulation with NonLinear constraints (MINLP) and an optimization approach, belonging to the framework of Branch and Benders Cut methods, which is based on the proposed MINLP formulation. In a non-standard fashion, the master problem of the approach includes the variables of the Benders subproblem, but relaxes their integrality. The approach has been tested on a large set of instances, and compared to a more traditional Benders decomposition algorithm on a subset of instances without the assignment costs, where the two approaches can be compared. The main achievements of the computational experimentation are shortly discussed. Then, in the second part of the talk, we address the optimization of GWLANs in the presence of uncertainty factors. Specifically, we present a robust optimization approach that incorporates both link capacity fluctuations and user mobility under a generalization of Bertsimas and Sim's robust optimization paradigm. Again, preliminary computational results are shortly discussed.