A heuristically-driven multi-criteria tool for the design of efficient open WiFi access networks

This paper presents a novel heuristic multi-criteria tool capable of generating open-access wireless network deployments by exploiting the existing broadband infrastructure. Specifically, an external user dynamically selects, by virtue of our proposed scheme, a certain network layout depending on the target percentage of non-covered users and cost of the deployment. Network layouts differently balancing the trade-off between these two conflicting objectives are produced by two multi-objective heuristics based on genetic algorithm and harmony search, which are compared to each other through a number of Monte Carlo simulations. In light of the obtained results we conclude that the multi-objective harmony search scheme outperforms its genetically-inspired counterpart in terms of multi-objective quality metrics (hypervolume, epsilon indicator and R-metric). Therefore this tool, further improved by means of ad-hoc designed local search operators, is shown to embody an computationally efficient framework supporting operators in their open access network planning design processes.