Power Control Methods for Improving Spatial Reuse in TDMA-Based Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have attracted a great deal of interest in recent years as a cost-effective method to provide a wireless network infrastructure. To accommodate various types of application traffic in WMNs, improvement of network capacity is one of the most critical issues. The efficiency of wireless network resource utilization decreases due to radio interference when multiple transmissions occur simultaneously in an interference region. To resolve this problem, we focus on the transmission power control of mesh nodes. We expect to improve spatial reuse by applying power control because this decreases radio interference between wireless links. In this paper, we propose power control methods of mesh nodes for improving spatial reuse in TDMA-based wireless mesh networks. We first propose two types of power control methods, which employ a simple threshold-based mechanism. Furthermore, we develop an additional method that suppresses the unnecessary increase in path length associated with limiting the increase in the hop count to the nearby mesh nodes. Numerical evaluation results reveal that the proposed method decreases the frame length by up to 27% with non sensitive parameter setting.