Project Title

Integrated routing & MAC scheduling for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

The reduction in the prices of Wi-Fi products, their ready availability and an increasing demand for wireless access, has led to consideration of multi-hop "mesh networks" with extended range and network coverage. In this project, we are interested in establishing a dense mesh wireless infrastructure as the replacement of wired Ethernet LANs for indoor office environment. This network shall provide high-speed end-to-end connection while avoiding the co-channel interferences as well. In order to achieve this, we investigated the related design paradigms and proposed an interference-free switching mesh architecture. 

We use a top-down design approach to solve this problem. First, we conduct a theoretical analysis on the NUM (Network Utility Maximization) problem over a system model of multihop wireless mesh network. The results show that promising  performance gains can be achieved if the MAC scheduling and routing algorithms can be jointly optimized. Based on this discovery, we seek to renovate the protocol stacks to incorporate an integrated system realization of routing and scheduling. This new approcah is called IRMA (Integrated Routing and MAC scheduling). We introduce several key architecture underpinnings to realize integrated routing/scheduling first. We also developped centralized and distributed protocols and heuristic algorithms for IRMA design.

The proposed architecture and associated algorithms are evaluated using ns-2 simulations. From these simulation results, we found that the integrated routing/scheduling scheme would not only provides up to 300% improvement of the end-to-end throughput, but also reduce the signaling overhead in protocols for static wireless mesh networks, when compared with baseline 802.11-based multihop networks with independent routing.

Publication

Z. Wu, S. Ganu and D. Raychaudhuri, "IRMA: Integrated routing and MAC scheduling in multihop wireless mesh networks", in Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Wireless Mesh Networks, WiMesh 2006, Reston VA, Sept 2006.