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In this work, we develop a framework that jointly decides on the optimal location of wireless extenders and the channel configuration of extenders and access points (APs) in a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). Typically, the rule-based approaches in the literature result in limited exploration while reinforcement learning based approaches result in slow convergence. Therefore, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is adopted to support network autonomy and to capture insights on system and environment evolution. We propose a Self-X (self-optimizing and self-learning) framework that encapsulates both environment and intelligent agent to reach optimal operation through sensing, perception, reasoning and learning in a truly autonomous fashion. The agent derives adequate knowledge from previous actions improving the quality of future decisions. Domain experience was provided to guide the agent while exploring and exploiting the set of possible actions in the environment. Thus, it guarantees a low-cost learning and achieves a near-optimal network configuration addressing the non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness (NP-hard) problem of joint channel assignment and location optimization in WMNs. Extensive simulations are run to validate its fast convergence, high throughput and resilience to dynamic interference conditions. We deploy the framework on off-the-shelf wireless devices to enable autonomous self-optimization and self-deployment, using APs and wireless extenders., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, under review - IEEE TCOM

In this paper, we propose a self-deployment approach for finding the optimal placement of extenders in which both the wireless back-haul and front-haul throughput of the extender are optimized. We present an artificial intelligence (AI) case based reasoning (CBR) framework that enables autonomous self-deployment in which the network can learn the environment by means of sensing and perception. New actions, i.e. extender positions, are created by problem-specific optimization and semi-supervised learning algorithms that balance exploration and exploitation of the search space. An IEEE 802.11 standard compliant simulations are performed to evaluate the framework on a large scale and compare its performance against existing conventional coverage maximization approaches. Experimental evaluation is also performed in an enterprise environment to demonstrate the competence of the proposed AI-framework in perceiving such a dense scenario and reason the extender deployment that achieves user quality of service (QoS). Throughput fairness and ubiquitous QoS satisfaction are achieved which provide a leap to apply AI-driven self-deployment in wireless networks., Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, under review - IEEE TCOM