Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is currently among the most important technologies for wireless broadband
access. The IEEE 802.11 technology is attractive for its maturity and low equipment costs. The overall performance of a specific
WLAN installation is largely determined by the network layout and the radio channels used. Optimizing these design parameters
can greatly improve performance.
In this paper, access point (AP) placement and channel assignment is optimized using mathematical programming. Traditionally,
these decisions are taken sequentially; AP placement is often modeled as a facility location problem, channel assignment
as an (extended) graph coloring problem. Treating these key decisions separately may lead to suboptimal designs. We propose
an integrated model that addresses both aspects. The different optimization objectives and their tradeoff are taken into consideration simultaneously. Computational results show that indeed the integrated approach is superior to the sequential one.