Refining the impact of partially overlapping channels in wireless mesh networks through a cross-layer optimization model

摘要

Although many works exist on the subject, the real impact of partially-overlapping channels (POCs) on the capacity of multi-radio wireless mesh networks is not clearly established yet. In this paper, we propose a mathematical programming model to evaluate accurately the improvement in throughput that could be achieved if all the adjacent radio channels were exploited. Compared to previous works, our model tackles the problem with a fine-granularity control of a wider set of radio and network parameters related to routing, dynamic channel assignment, rate adaptation, transmission power and link scheduling. Due to its complexity, our problem is solved using column generation. Furthermore, we propose a suboptimal fast procedure to solve the induced subproblem of link selection with joint channel assignment, rate adaptation and power control. While our numerical experimentations on random topologies show that employing POCs leads to similar throughput increase (i.e., around 11%) to some previous work, our main result is that this gain is found to be almost negligible for more realistic topologies.