Design and management of wireless mesh networks

无线网状网络（WMN）由通过无线链路互连的固定无线路由器组成，其中一小部分充当经由有线（例如，以太网）或无线（例如，WIMAX）链接。WMN面临的关键挑战之一是支持高吞吐量。最大可用带宽随着网状网络中的源和目的地之间的距离的增加而迅速降低（即，在移动终端和到因特网的网关之间经过的无线路由器的数量）;这种降级是由于来自相邻跳和路径的干扰而引起的。例如，在具有相同和全向无线电范围的网络中，从单跳到两跳会使流的吞吐量减半。这可能是灾难性的网络供应商着眼于提供的延迟/吞吐量的水平，人们习惯于与他们的有线网络。WMN的容量可以增加使用多个无线电节点与多个（正交）信道;此外，通过仔细适应无线路由器的传输功率，可以最大限度地减少干扰，从而增加容量。在这个项目中，我们打算（a）开发新的“统一”模型和工具，用于设计WMN，主要目标是增加WMN的容量;我们提案的独特之处在于，而不是处理每个组件（例如，多信道、功率控制、成本等）单独地，如在文献中到目前为止所做的那样，我们将通过利用它们之间的密切关系使用统一的方法来解决上述问题;以及（B）开发新的基于策略的自适应管理方案，为不同类别的用户提供QoS支持和保证。这些方案背后的基本新颖思想是对异常做出反应（例如，故障和拥塞）通过重新配置（例如，新的信道分配、新的拓扑），同时最小化、理想地避免对正在进行的业务的影响。

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.