Metaheuristic Approaches for Gateway Placement Optimization in Wireless Mesh Networks: A survey

Recently Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have gained significant roles in communication technologies and have been used in many applications with high sensitivity to packet loss, delay and transmission time. Therefore, many researchers paid their attention for solving WMNs related issues. The WMN consists of Mesh Routers (MRs) and Mesh Clients (MCs), some of MRs have external interfaces and additional functionalities to act as internet gateways so that most of the network traffics move toward these gateways. Thus, Gateways placement is critical in WMN design and there are many conflicting requirements that make the problem difficult to be solved such as construction cost, interference, transmission delay, congestion. Hence, the gateway placement is considered NP-Hard so that it's difficult to find the optimal solution and methods to find approximate or near optimal solution are required. In this paper, we will present some issues related to gateway placement problem, some research efforts that have done in this area especially the research works that based on metaheuristic methods finally discussion and recommendations about the existence solutions will be presented to help the readers how to choose among these solutions.