A joint power control,time-sharing and routing scheme to minimize spectrum utilization in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Despite the abundance of the optimization models proposed so far in the literature to improve the performance or to reduce the deployment costs of wireless mesh networks, only a few works have addressed explicitly the minimization of spectrum utilization in these networks. Considering the scarcity of this critical resource mainly caused by the tremendous recent developments in wireless technologies, we address in this paper the problem of minimizing the number of used radio channels while satisfying a set of end-to-end traffic demands. We formulate to this end a mixed-integer linear program as a cross-layer optimization approach acting on various aspects, such as channel assignment, power control, medium access and flow routing. Due to the expensive computational costs required to find exact solutions, we propose various approximation schemes that provide near-optimal results in a reasonable amount of time. We illustrate the impact of various parameters such as radio patterns, requested traffic loads, network density on the total required spectrum. Results show how a knowledgeable exploitation of spatial reuse can save significantly spectrum utilization.