One of the key advantages of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is their importance for providing cost-efficient broadband connectivity. There are issues for achieving the network connectivity and user coverage, which are related with the node placement problem. In this work, we compare Hill Climbing (HC), Simulated Annealing (SA) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) by simulations for node placement problem. We want to find the optimal distribution of router nodes in order to provide the best network connectivity and provide the best coverage in a set of randomly distributed clients. From the simulation results, all algorithms converge to the maximum size of Giant Component (GC). However, according to the number of covered mesh clients, HC and SA converge faster.

With the fast development of wireless technologies, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are becoming an important networking infrastructure due to their low cost and increased high speed wireless Internet connectivity. In our previous work, we implemented the Linearly Decreasing Vmax Method (LDVM) for our WMN-PSO simulation system. In this paper, we implement a new replacement method for mesh routers called Rational Decrement of Vmax Method (RDVM). We use Size of Giant Component (SGC) and Number of Covered Mesh Clients (NCMC) as metrics for optimization. From the simulation results, we found that RDVM converges faster to best solution than LDVM.