Joint resource allocation and admission control in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Many next generation applications (such as video flows) are likely to have associated minimum data rate requirements to ensure satisfactory quality as perceived by end-users. While there have been prior approaches on supporting quality-of-service (QoS) in mesh networks, they have largely ignored the issues that arise due to self-interference, the interference between different link layer transmissions of a single flow along a multi-hop path. In this paper, we develop a framework to address the problem of maximizing the aggregate utility of traffic flows in wireless mesh networks, with constraints imposed both due to self-interference and minimum rate requirements. The output of our framework is a schedule that dictates which links are to be activated simultaneously, and provides specifications of the resources associated with each of those links. Utilizing the proposed framework as a basis, we build an admission control module that intelligently manages the resources among the flows in the network and admits as many new flows as possible without violating the QoS of the existing flows. We provide numerical results to demonstrate the efficacy of our framework.