Rate Region of Multi-channel Mesh Data Networks with Rate Control

Mesh networking has recently been advocated as an efficient and low-cost approach for providing high speed access to the Internet. Before such networks are able to support high-bandwidth data transfers in reality, a number of challenges must be addressed including routing, channel and radio interface assignments, radio resource management, and MAC scheduling. Our focus in this paper is to provide guidelines on the design of optimal radio resource management and distributed MAC scheduling algorithms. To this aim, we develop a general analytical model to characterize the performance of such networks. This task comprises many major difficulties: analyzing the behavior of distributed MAC schedulers in multi-hop networks, accounting for the interaction of links through interference and quantifying the impact of underlying congestion control algorithms. We present a unified approach partially based on decoupling arguments to address these challenges. Specifically, we provide approximations of the rate region of the network. Based on the derived results, we can propose a set of design rules for mesh multi-channel networks. For example, we investigate how to parametrize the coverage of the RTS/CTS signalling messages in IEEE 802.11-based networks.