POCOSIM: A Power Control and Scheduling Scheme in Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Transmission power control (TPC) is a key technique in wireless networking. There are abundant works on TPC aiming at saving the energy or improving the performance of WSNs, MANETs and WLANs. However, the research on throughput-and-fairness-oriented TPC scheme represented for multi-rate wireless mesh networks is rather limited. As routers usually have stable power supply, throughput rather than energy consumption is the most crucial factor in wireless mesh networks. Therefore POCOSIM (POwer COntrol and Scheduling scheme In Multi-rate wireless mesh networks) is introduced in this paper to improve the throughput and the fairness in the context of multi-rate WMN. Traffic patterns of the system are analyzed based on a model of conflict graph, and a differential evolution based algorithm is proposed to optimize the time allocation vector. Simulations demonstrate that POCOSIM can improve the throuhgput and also can strike a balance between throughput and fairness.