First steps in Mesh WiFi network design by genetic algorithm

Given a mesh of wireless nodes for WiFi customers covering a city district, we describe a genetic algorithm-based approach to the problem of selecting a small fixed number of nodes as gateways to the internet, and linking the remaining nodes to the gateways either directly or by 'hopping', to create an efficient mesh network structure. The algorithm uses a modification of k-means clustering to allocate nodes to gateways.