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

Abstract

The aggregate capacity of wireless mesh networks is severely affected by interflow interference. Directional antennas and multiple channels are two well known techniques which can be applied to mitigate interflow interference. In this work, a network architecture is proposed to incorporate directional antennas with multiple orthogonal channels effectively to enhance the performance of wireless mesh networks. We first introduce a sectored connectivity graph to model multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks with directional antennas. We then proceed to formulate the topology design, directional interface assignment, channel allocation and routing mathematically as a mixed integer programming problem. This problem is solved using an iterated local search algorithm to obtain optimized resource allocation in the network. Simulation results indicate that the proposed architecture can achieve higher packet delivery ratio. It also provides better fairness among the flows in the network by proper resource allocation, load balancing and capacity planning.