Mesh router selection to maximize system throughput in dense Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a promising networking architecture because of its useful characteristics such as low deployment cost, ease of maintenance, network robustness and reliable coverage. Each node in the network is referred to either as Mesh Router (MR), Mesh Client (MC), or Mesh Gateway (MG) depending on its role in the network. MRs are interconnected to form a mesh backbone network, which can relay communications service from MCs to the MG. In many situations, MRs deployment are uncontrollable, and thus deployed MRs may not have ideal locations. In addition, in a dense network, using all available MRs that are deployed randomly to form mesh backbone network would results in a lower performance than what could be achieved. Therefore, our goal aims to select a set of working MRs that would yield an improved upper bound throughput, while still preserving connectivity. Our contributions include using graphs to represent multi-tier WMN and utilizing them to determine the set of MRs that can be safely removed from the network without severing any connectivity of the network. Furthermore, we proposed algorithm that goes through those set of MRs to determine the MRs which should be removed from the network to improve the overall performance, and we demonstrate capacity improvement brought by our scheme through simulations.