Towards Global Connectivity by Joint Routing and Scheduling in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are at the forefront of the technological drive. Achieving high system throughput in these networks is challenging due to interference which limits concurrent transmissions. In this paper we study routing and link scheduling in time division multiple access networks free of contention. We extend the work in the literature in several ways: (a) we present simple joint routing and time slot scheduling algorithms that have outperformed the existing proposals in most of our experiments, (b) we report the results using a simple combinatorial bound on the optimal routing/scheduling solution which gives us an absolute measure of the quality of the routes, (c) we depart from the classical routing tree approach by constructing session based routes for data and we quantify the performance gains for this approach to justify its use when QoS constraints are considered. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate our model. Results from the experiments indicate that our model outperforms most of the known approaches in the literature.