Multi-commodity Flow Problem for Multi-hop Wireless Networks with Realistic Smart Antenna Model

Abstract

Abstract. Utilizing smart antennas in multi-hop wireless networks can boost their performance. However, most of the work done in the context of wireless adhoc and sensor networking assume ideal or over-simplistic antenna patterns that overrate the performance benefits. In this paper, we compute the optimal throughput of multi-hop wireless networks with realistic smart antenna model. Our goal is to evaluate the network performance degradation using real smart antenna as compared to using the ideal model. We derive a generic interference model that can accommodate any antenna radiation pattern. We formulate the problem as a multi-commodity flow problem with novel interference constraints derived from our generic interference model. Our numerical results show that using a real-world smart antenna in a dense network results in up to 55% degradation in the throughput as compared to the case of ideal flat-topped antenna, whereas the throughput degradation is as much as 37% in a sparse network.

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

“…In the context of directional antennas, MIP appears in the form of maximum flow problem in sensor networks with single beam and multi-beam antennas [10]. MIP is also formulated as a multi-commodity flow problem in multi-hop wireless networks with realistic smart antenna model [11]. These works have considered either directional antennas or multiple channels separately.…”