Track: Undergraduate Student Paper Competition

Abstract

The internet plays a very vital role in the education sector. Having a good internet connection in an educational institution such as a university campus is a must-have. For a campus network, the university installs WLAN Access Points (AP) in certain areas. Users can access the internet using their devices in these certain areas covered by the APs signal. This study is applied to the Gaziantep University campus in order to find the optimal locations of outdoor access points that satisfy demand points. To do so, first of all, geographic information of 17 current and 14 new potential locations of outdoor access points, and 25 demand points were gathered using their GPS coordinates. Second, two of the location-allocation models were used; one of them is the Set-Covering model which was used to find the minimum number of outdoor APs to cover all campus areas within a specific distance. The other one is the maximal-coverage location problem (MCLP) model which tries to maximize the demand to be covered, served by a fixed number of Wi-Fi APs. Distances between the total 31 potential locations and 25 demand points were taken using the Euclidean Distance Algorithm. Then, the models were solved using GAMS, software for mathematical optimization. The results obtained were compared with the current system and showed approximately 30% improvements in some aspects.