Topology Control in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is an emerging technology for providing wireless broadband access due to its capability of self-organization and self- con guration. These kinds of networks are very helpful for various applica- tions where the wired backbone is not available or expensive and also these are reliable due to availability of redundant paths between the sender and receiver. The main disadvantage of WMN is the highly connected network topology, which results in high interference, thus a ecting the aggregate end to end throughput. The capacity of WMNs can be improved signi cantly by equipping each node with multiple interfaces and by using multiple channels (MR-MC) but the limitation of channels in the radio spectrum restricts the network to a certain bandwidth limit. Thus an e ective MR-MC topology control strategy is required to overcome this problem. In this paper, rst we propose an optimization model on the basis of interference and link capaci- ties that nd out the aggregate end to end throughput for a given network topology having static tra c on all the possible disjoint multiple paths. Then we propose new optimized Interference Aware Pruned Two Path (IA-P2P) topology control scheme which uses our network optimization model and prunes some links in the physical topology to select best two among multiple completely disjoint paths for each ow. This pruning process minimizes the interference which results in higher throughput as compare to actual physical multipath topology. The mathematical results of the model show that this reduction in interference provides more chances of transmission for nodes and hence enhances aggregate end to end throughput by 21.3%. Extensive simu- lation based experiments in OPNET simulator have also been conducted to test the e ectiveness of the proposed scheme. Simulation results also demon- strate that our IA-P2P topology control scheme can increase throughput by 16.8% than the existing physical multipath topology control scheme.