Fault-tolerant interference-aware topology control in multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks offer an effective technology to establish broadband wireless services. Due to this application, robustness against failures and throughput improvement are the two main objectives in designing such networks. In this paper, we use the “topology control” as a set of tools to reach these objectives. Topology control in wireless mesh networks is an NP-hard problem; therefore, we propose a heuristic method known as Fault-Tolerant Interference-Aware Topology Control (FITC) to solve it in a distributed fashion. In this method, we first guarantee that the network is K-Connected using the graph modification, routing and channel assignment. Then, power control, rate adaptation, channel selection and scheduling is applied to enhance the network throughput. Due to the static channel assignment and the fixed location of the nodes in the network, the first part of the algorithm is conducted using a centralized method, while a distributed cross layer method is applied for the second part. Simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed method in achieving the main objectives.