Joint resource allocation in multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks with practical sectored antennas

Abstract

The aggregate capacity of wireless mesh networks is severely affected by interflow interference. Directional antennas and multiple channels are two well known techniques which can be applied to mitigate interflow interference. In this work, a network architecture is proposed to incorporate directional antennas with multiple orthogonal channels effectively to enhance the performance of wireless mesh networks. We first introduce a sectored connectivity graph to model multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks with directional antennas. We then proceed to formulate the topology design, directional interface assignment, channel allocation and routing mathematically as a mixed integer programming problem. This problem is solved using an iterated local search algorithm to obtain optimized resource allocation in the network. Simulation results indicate that the proposed architecture can achieve higher packet delivery ratio. It also provides better fairness among the flows in the network by proper resource allocation, load balancing and capacity planning.

Tactical Wireless Network Design with Multi-Beam Antennas

“…For perspective, we also evaluate random trees from the space of possible topologies. For 10 nodes, we can also compare our algorithm with a version of the algorithm in [2] adapted to our problem [6]. The means and standard deviations of the results are given in Table 2.…”

“…The search still manages to find very good solutions with more than 80 % of the best known objective value. The baseline adapted from [2] cannot deal with more than 10 nodes. Moreover, the values it finds for 10 nodes are worse than our very simple minimum spanning tree initialization.…”

“…In practice, usual instances of the problem have around 50 nodes and a solution is typically designed by hand. With up to around 20 nodes, Mixed Integer Programming formulations of approximated versions of the problem have had success finding good suboptimal solutions by using Iterated Local Search [2] and Column Generation [3]. With 10 nodes, exhaustive enumeration is possible.…”

An overview of topology control mechanisms in multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

“…They do not take into account the directional interface assignment issue, the antennas are assumed to point to each other during communication. The authors in [51] predefined the antenna orientation using a sectored connectivity graph and formulated their architecture mathematically as a mixed integer linear problem. The problem is then solved to acquire topology, channel assignment, interface allocation and routing decisions.…”