A decentralized minislot scheduling protocol (DMSP) in TDMA-based wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh network is a promising network topology that can provide high data rate backhaul network access. For achieving high data rate backhaul network access, a well-designed bandwidth scheduling protocol is necessary for wireless mesh networks. This paper takes minislot scheduling problem for IEEE 802.16 mesh networks as an example and formulates the problem as an integer linear programming model in this paper, where minislot is an atomic bandwidth allocation unit for data transmissions among subscriber stations and base station. Due to the high computational complexity for solving integer linear programming model at subscriber stations and the degradation of bandwidth utilization resulted from data collision problems and minislot insufficient problems, this paper proposes a decentralized minislot scheduling protocol to make subscriber stations, rather than base station, schedule minislot usage for throughput gains in the IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. The decentralized minislot scheduling protocol includes minislot usage constraints and minislot decision strategies to alleviate data collisions and minislot insufficient problems as well as to increase bandwidth utilization. The proposed protocol can not only accommodate to the IEEE 802.16 standard, but also makes subscriber stations schedule minislots with the latest minislot usage information. Besides IEEE 802.16 mesh networks, the proposed protocol also can apply to any wireless mesh networks with less or no modifications. From the simulation results, the performance of the proposed protocol outperforms the other related contributions in terms of the transmission delay, control overhead, minislot utilization and the network throughput.