Uplink Scheduling in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been drawing significant attention due to their support for low cost broadband wireless Internet access. Despite extensive deployments in recent years, the 802.11 based wireless mesh networks suffer from unfairness attributed to the lack of adequate support for multihop communications. Most existing solutions focus on hard fairness by investigating fairness without considering its effect on throughput and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization technique to achieve fairness and maximize network throughput through unused bandwidth reallocation. We have defined an inverse fairness index that minimizes the difference between the requested bandwidth and proportionally allocates extra bandwidth to each mesh router to balance fairness and throughput. The proposed method was compared with hard fair scheduling and without fair scheduling.