Fair Bandwidth Allocation Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

To reap the benefits of advances in wireless technologies as well as provide backward compatibility with current investments, future wireless routers that constitute the backbone of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) will be equipped with multiple radios of different technology standards. The multiplicity of channels, radios and technology standards makes the problem of efficient network utilization in a WMN more challenging. Unlike previous works that focused only on homogeneous WMNs, in this paper, we focus on determining an effective routing, channel assignment and scheduling scheme that maximizes the network capacity, while maintaining node level fairness in a heterogeneous network setting. We first introduce a novel graph model that captures the WMN heterogeneity in terms of the number of radios and radio technologies. Using this model, we provide an optimization formulation that determines the effective routing scheme and traffic values on each edge. To determine an interference-free channel assignment of these traffic values, we introduce a joint channel assignment and scheduling algorithm that preserves node level fairness. We perform an extensive evaluation of our solution in homogeneous and heterogeneous networks and study the impact of the number of orthogonal channels, radios, gateways and the aggregate traffic demand on the performance of our solution. Our results show that the proposed scheme obtains node level fairness while maximizing the network capacity.