Dynamic traffic engineering for high-throughput data forwarding in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

High-throughput data delivery in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a challenging problem due to dynamic changes of link quality, interference and congestion. In this work, we first develop an optimization framework for Dynamic Traffic Engineering (O-DTE) in WMNs that aims to minimize the interference and congestion at each hop through joint power and rate control so as to achieve high-throughput data delivery. Due to NP-hardness of the O-DTE framework, we then develop a greedy heuristic alternate solution (G-DTE) that enables routers, at each hop, to select outgoing links offering higher data rates and reduced interferences. Thus, the proposed G-DTE produces near optimal results by taking multi-path data forwarding decisions in distributed fashion; it exploits single-hop neighborhood information only and thus it is scalable. The simulation results, carried out in ns-3, demonstrate that the proposed G-DTE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art works in terms of throughput, delay, reliability and fairness performances.