Achieving capacity fairness for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Abstract This paper addresses a joint problem of power control and channel assignment within a wireless mesh network. A wireless mesh network is made up of two kinds of nodes: mesh routers (MRs) and user nodes (UNs). The MRs form a backbone network, while UNs receive data from the backbone network by connecting to the MRs via one hop. This paper aims to find the optimal joint solution of power control and channel assignment of the wireless mesh networks such that the minimum capacity of all links is maximized. We develop an upper bound for the objective by relaxing the integer variables and linearization. Subsequently, we put forward a heuristic approach to approximate the optimal solution, which tries to increase the minimal capacity of all links via setting tighter constraint and solving a binary integer programming problem. Simulation results show that solutions obtained by this algorithm are very close to the upper bounds obtained via relaxation, thus suggesting that the solution produced by the algorithm is near‐optimal. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.