ROPS: Recursively Optimized Prepartitioning Strategy to allocate Key Devices Positions in Large-Scale RF Mesh Networks

RF-Mesh networks have been extensively used for the deployment of smart grid communications and large-scale implementations of them are expected to continue growing. As a RF-Mesh network grows, latency becomes a concern and interconnection devices are inserted to increase coverage, performance and resiliency. The optimal position of the interconnection devices and collectors represents a NP-hard problem whose solution is approximated by heuristic and computationally expensive solutions. This paper presents a recursive partitioning approach to positioning key devices in large-scale wireless mesh networks that significantly reduces the computational demand of an existing positioning algorithm. Theoretical analysis of performance improvement, along with results of extensive simulations using a publicly available dataset, demonstrate that the proposed approach can improve the execution time of the original algorithm up to 20 times without affecting important QoS parameters.