Design and management of wireless mesh networks

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Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) consist of stationary wireless routers interconnected by wireless links with a small fraction acting as gateways to the Internet via wired (e.g., Ethernet) or wireless (e.g., WIMAX) links. One of the key challenges facing WMNs is supporting high throughput. The maximum available bandwidth degrades rapidly with increasing distance between the source and destination in the mesh network (i.e., the number of wireless routers traversed between the mobile device and the gateway to the Internet); this degradation is caused due to interference from neighboring hops and paths. For example, in a network with identical and omnidirectional radio ranges, going from a single hop to two hops halves the throughput of a flow. This can be disastrous for network providers eying to provide the level of latency/throughput people are accustomed to with their wired networks.The capacity of WMNs can be increased using multi-radio nodes with multiple (orthogonal) channels; also, with careful adaptation of transmission power of wireless routers, one can minimize interferences and thus increase the capacity. In this project we intend to (a) develop new "unified" models and tools for the design of WMNs with the primary goal of increasing the capacity of WMNs; the uniqueness of our proposal lies in the fact that rather than treating each of the components (e.g., multi-channel, power control, cost, etc.) separately, as has been done so far in the literature, we will address the above issues using a unified approach by exploiting the intimate relationship among them; and (b) develop new policy-based adaptive management schemes to provide QoS support and assurance for different classes of users. The basic novel idea behind these schemes is to react to anomalies (e.g., failure and congestion) by reconfiguring (e.g., new channel assignment, new topology) the WMN while minimizing, ideally avoiding, the impact on the ongoing traffic.