Mesh Network Deployment to Ensure Global Reachability

We propose and study a network design problem whose goal is to ensure Internet reachability to mobile wireless devices. Such design of networks is a resource location-allocation problem related to minimum cost unsplitable flow in a tripartite network. We present IP formulation for the problem, and produce test results with ILOG CPLEX. We also present heuristic algorithms using local search and VNS based procedures. We test the algorithms with different randomly generated network instances from size 500-5000 nodes. Our algorithms could obtain optimal solution for some of the input instances, beat the solutions obtained by CPLEX for some others, and obtained a worst case integrality gap of 3% for the rest.