A new joint strategy of radio channel allocation and power control for wireless mesh networks

For wireless mesh networks, it is critical to allocate the limited number of radio channels efficiently while mitigating the co-channel inference to improve network performance. For this reason, after extensively reviewing the related work, we present a new joint radio channel allocation (RCA) and power control (PC) strategy for wireless mesh networks. First, we formulate the RCA problem as a multiple objective optimization problem, with the constraints of transmission power and traffic data rates, while effective channel utilization (ECU) is chosen as the target metric for optimization. Second, we incorporate the channel status into the model of MAC protocols, including as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and transmission power. Consequently, the PC is incorporated into the ECU for channel allocation. Third, we propose to directly maximize the ECU to find both optimal radio channel and transmission power. The resulting strategy is a fully distributed RCA/PC algorithm without relying on a coordination mechanism among mesh routers. Our extensive simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the existing RCA strategies and the standard MAC protocols in performance such as throughput, packet dropping, delay and delay jitter.