Evaluation of Various Interference Models for Joint Routing and Scheduling in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

We explore radio resource allocation in wireless mesh networks, namely we study how to determine a space- and time-division pattern of transmissions, to deliver traffic to gateway nodes. We highlight link scheduling and routing issues, which we investigate in a cross-layer framework. To this end, an integer linear program is presented, where diverse constraints affect resource allocation; in particular, we focus in this paper on the key role played by the characterization of radio interference. Finally, we obtain numerical results through a genetic algorithm, and we are able to show that the wireless interference model adopted strongly affects the performance of the radio resource allocation; thus, an accurate representation of the wireless channel is necessary to obtain meaningful results.