Joint Handoff and Energy Management for a Wireless Mesh Network

Abstract

A lot of access points (APs) in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are battery powered. In order to minimize their energy consumption, the APs can adaptively adjust their transmission power and time based on various network conditions. In this paper, the problem of minimizing the AP energy consumption is formulated as an optimization problem with the constraint to satisfy the throughput requirements of associated mobile stations (MSs). Balancing the AP energy consumption can be challenging in a network with high and random user mobility, which can easily result in unbalanced traffic load and energy consumption among the APs. Two distributed handoff schemes are proposed for a WMN with adaptive transmission power and rate. One scheme attempts to achieve balanced energy consumption among the APs during each scheduling interval, and the other scheme balances the AP energy consumption over a longer term. Numerical results show that both schemes achieve much longer network lifetime than the traditional distance-based handoff scheme, while the long-term based handoff scheme can achieve the objective with approximately the same number of handoffs as the distancebased handoff.

Pre-scheduled handoff for service-aware and seamless internet access

“…Yang et. al in [19] propose a joint handoff and energy management solution for WMNs, in which two distributed handoff schemes are proposed for WMNs with adaptive transmission power and rate. Observing the large handoff delay as a result of the queueing delay and medium access delay at each MR due to the multi-hop transmissions of signaling messages for handoff, the authors in [20,21] propose channel allocation and channel splitting strategies to reduce the channel access delay.…”

“…To address problems associated with the handoff, many efforts have been made to improve the handoff process. The solutions include shortening the time of L 2 channel scanning [4,5,6], optimizing Mobile IP for a better L 3 handoff support [7,8,9], improving multi-hop routing to facilitate handoff [10,11,12,13,14,15,16], and other methods from various aspects [17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. These studies generally attempt to increase the Internet access in a best effort and opportunistic manner: providing a best connection whenever it is available along a given path.…”

Channel Time Allocations and Handoff Management for Fair Throughput in Wireless Mesh Networks

“…However, higher power subsequently results in spectral interference. Therefore, adaptive power allocation (APA) has been applied as one of the solutions on decreasing the interference in the network as well as minimizing the MR energy consumption (Yang and Zhao, 2011).…”