A novel and effective multi-constrained QoS routing scheme in WMNs

Abstract

Multi-constrained quality of service (QoS) routing aims at finding an optimal path that satisfies a set of QoS parameters, as an NP complete problem, which is also a big challenge for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Heuristic algorithms with polynomial and pseudo-polynomial-time complexities are often used to deal with this problem. However, existing solutions, most of which suffered either from excessive computational complexities or from low performance, were proposed only for wired networks and cannot be used directly in wireless mesh networks. In this paper, we propose a novel routing scheme based on mean field annealing (MFA-RS) to solve this problem. MFA-RS first uses a function of two QoS parameters, wireless link’s delay and transmission success rate as the cost function, and then seeks to find a feasible path by MFA. Because MFA-RS uses a set of deterministic equations to replace the stochastic process in simulated annealing (SA) and uses saddle point approximation in the calculation of the stationary probability distribution at equilibrium, the convergence time is much less than the routing scheme based on SA (SA-RS). Simulation results demonstrate that MFA-RS is an effective algorithm and is very fit for WMNs.