Autonomous Self-deployment of Wireless Access Networks in an Airport Environment

In environments with highly dynamic user demand, such as an airport, high over-dimensioning of wireless networks, resulting in a large number of base stations, is required to be able to serve high user densities at any possible location of the covered area. This problem is addressed with the novel concept of a self-deploying network. Such network would be able to identify the need for changes in position and configuration of wireless access nodes autonomously, and adapt to its environment. In this paper, distributed algo-rithms for autonomous self- deployment and self-configuration of wireless ac-cess networks are proposed. It is shown that a self-deploying network can sig-nificantly reduce the number of required base stations compared to a statically deployed network. This is demonstrated in a specific test scenario at Athens In-ternational Airport, simulating a moving user hot-spot after the arrival of an air- plane.