Efficient rate allocation, routing and channel assignment in wireless mesh networks supporting dynamic traffic flows

doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2013.04.002

Ad Hoc Networks

Volume 11, Issue 6, August 2013, Pages 1765-1781

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2013.04.002 Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper we address the issue of joint routing, channel re-assignment and rate allocation in multi-radio multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) with the goal of optimizing the performance of the current set of flows in the WMN. The objective is to balance the instantaneous traffic in the network at the flow level, optimize link-channel assignment and allocate flow rates to achieve proportional fairness given the current traffic and network constraints, including the topology, interference characteristics, number of available channels and radios. Unlike prior work, we do not assume a priori knowledge of traffic, and instead take into account the instantaneous traffic conditions to optimize performance at the flow level, taking both throughput and fairness into account. In this work we analyze the problem and, due to its hardness, propose a fast heuristic algorithm (JRCAR) to solve it. We evaluate this algorithm through numerical experiments, including comparisons against optimal solutions. In addition, we show that JRCAR can be used in a highly responsive system in practical scenarios with time-varying traffic conditions. We implement such a system under the ns-3 simulator, where the simulation results obtained corroborate the behavior observed in the numerical experiments and show that JRCAR is effective in dynamic and practical conditions.

Section snippets

Introduction and motivation

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have attracted much attention in recent years. One of the main reasons is that they provide a cost-effective way of deploying a wide-area network to provide last-mile access, including Internet access. Recent reduction in hardware costs permits equipping mesh routers with multiple radio interfaces. In these networks, the effective use of multiple non-overlapping channels (e.g. 3 in IEEE 802.11b/g and 12 in IEEE 802.11a) can significantly enhance the network

Related work

In the last years there has appeared a large body of work on the subject of joint routing and channel assignment in WMNs. Most existing proposals can be classified broadly in two groups: centralized and offline solutions [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], where a central node computes the routing and CA, and distributed and online solutions [8], [9], [10], [11], where mesh routers exchange information dynamically to compute routing paths and CA.

Raniwala et al. proposed centralized and distributed

Joint routing, channel assignment and rate allocation problem

In this section we model and analyze the joint problem.

JRCAR: Joint Routing, Channel Assignment and Rate allocation Heuristic

In this section we explain the design of the algorithm for Joint Routing, Channel Assignment and Rate allocation, which we call JRCAR. To tackle the joint problem formulated in the previous section, the main idea is to decompose it into separate routing, channel assignment and rate allocation subproblems which are easier to solve (although still hard in the case of the first two subproblems). In the process of identifying these subproblems, we want to meet the following requirements:

1.
Problems

Numerical results

In this section we evaluate the performance of JRCAR through numerical experiments.

Simulation experiments

In this section we evaluate the JRCAR algorithm in dynamic networks, using the control system proposed in [16], through simulation in ns-3 [24].

Conclusions

Routing, channel assignment and rate allocation are critical aspects of multi-radio multi-channel WMNs that jointly affect the performance of traffic flows, both in terms of aggregate and per-flow throughput as well as fairness. To optimize performance it is necessary to effectively use the available network resources, by balancing load across transmission links, giving more capacity to loaded regions through channel re-assignment and allocating rate with a throughput and fairness objective.

Juan J. Galvez received his B.Sc. (2004), M.Sc. (2007) and Ph.D. (2011) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Murcia, Spain. He works as a Research Associate at the Department of Information and Communications Engineering (DIIC) at the University of Murcia (UMU).

During these years he has participated in a number of research projects funded by the European Union, Spanish government and private companies, and has published refereed papers in international journals and conferences.

His

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Some proposals available in the literature assume that the bi-criteria optimization problem of load balancing and aggregate path length is too computationally expensive to be solved in an exact manner. Thus, they create heuristics to efficiently solve the problem of jointly optimizing the network bottleneck (i.e., load balancing) and the flow path length, such as in the case of Gálvez and Ruiz (2013), Liu et al. (2012), and de Mello et al. (2016). However, this approach has two serious drawbacks.
This paper presents a bi-objective network flow routing problem regarding network load balancing and flow path length. The problem is formulated within the integer programming framework and an exact and polynomial approach based on the ϵ-constraint technique is presented. In each iteration, our algorithm solves a single-objective linear integer programming subproblem. The goal of our approach is to obtain a minimal complete set of Pareto-optimal solutions. Our proposal was evaluated through several computational experiments, which included grid and random networks. The random topology was generated by the Barabási–Albert model and the settings of the network flows defined here are those commonly used in wireless sensor networks and wireless mesh networks. The analysis of the computational results provide a decision maker with valuable information about which factors most affect the solutions, for example, the smallest and largest bottleneck, the size of increment in the shortest path of the last Pareto-optimal solution and the difference between the path lengths of the first and last Pareto-optimal solutions generated.
Dynamic traffic engineering for high-throughput data forwarding in wireless mesh networks
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High-throughput data delivery in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a challenging problem due to dynamic changes of link quality, interference and congestion. In this work, we first develop an optimization framework for Dynamic Traffic Engineering (O-DTE) in WMNs that aims to minimize the interference and congestion at each hop through joint power and rate control so as to achieve high-throughput data delivery. Due to NP-hardness of the O-DTE framework, we then develop a greedy heuristic alternate solution (G-DTE) that enables routers, at each hop, to select outgoing links offering higher data rates and reduced interferences. Thus, the proposed G-DTE produces near optimal results by taking multi-path data forwarding decisions in distributed fashion; it exploits single-hop neighborhood information only and thus it is scalable. The simulation results, carried out in ns-3, demonstrate that the proposed G-DTE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art works in terms of throughput, delay, reliability and fairness performances.
Improving load balancing, path length, and stability in low-cost wireless backhauls
2016, Ad Hoc Networks
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Additionally, route stability and fairness between the flows are also desired properties of a joint approach solution. As would be expected, finding an optimum solution for the joint approach problem is also NP-hard [23,24] and, depending on the problem formulation, there may exist several non-dominated solutions, i.e., the problem may become multi-objective. A good deal of work has been carried out on the subject of joint routing and channel assignment in WMNs.
Futuristic wireless networks are being proposed to promote a significant improvement in performance, mainly in highly dense scenarios. However, cost constraints are also a key concern for the next generation of wireless networks. In this context, Low-cost Wireless Backhauls (LWBs) can provide relevant contributions. LWBs are based on WLAN technologies, such as Wireless Mesh Networks, in which gateways to the wired networks are potential bottlenecks, and load balancing is critical for performance. In spite of several proposals to deal with load balancing, they fail to combine three key aspects: (1) stability, (2) reduction of the average path length, and (3) throughput fairness. Our proposal addresses these aspects by adopting a joint approach for routing and channel assignment. The routing part is composed of a heuristic that employs an on-demand local solution in which load balancing is combined with the three aforementioned key aspects. We have carried out an in-depth simulation study in ns-3 to assess the impact of our proposal on traffic performance when compared with the state of the art. Our proposal is superior in most of the scenarios, in particular in terms of stability and average path length. Our proposal also increases the aggregate throughput and minimum throughput per flow in the network, especially when the number of flows is large.
Review of channel assignment approaches in multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh network
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The Channel Assignment (CA) is an efficient tool to exploit multiple non-overlapping channels to minimize interference and enhance the capacity of the wireless mesh network. Even though the CA can minimize the total network interference, its result may cause some design issues which influence the network performance. First, the CA alters the network topology which in turn may produce unconnected logical topology. Second, the interaction between the CA and routing protocol where the effective capacity of each link depends on the routing decision and the result of CA. In this article we focus on multi-radio, multi-channel wireless mesh network. First, we defined the channel assignment (CA) design issues. Second, we classified the CA approaches based on the main design issues. For each CA approach, its advantages and limitations are highlighted. Third, the overall comparison for the classification is given in details. Finally, we discussed the future research direction for channel assignment.
A hybrid framework for routing and channel assignment in WMN's
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Flow routing aiming load balancing and path length in multi-hop networks with different link qualities
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His main research interests include mobile and ad hoc wireless networks, wireless mesh networks, routing, distributed algorithms and network protocols, resource allocation and optimization.

Pedro M. Ruiz received his B.Sc. (1999), M.Sc. (2001) and Ph.D. (2002) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Murcia, Spain. He works as Associate Professor in Telematics at the Department of Information and Communication Engineering (DIIC) at the University of Murcia (UMU). In 2003 he was awarded a Ramón y Cajal research position by the Spanish MEC. He has also held Post-doctoral research positions at ICSI in Berkeley, King’s College London and University of California at Santa Cruz. During these years he has acted as Principal Investigator in a number of research projects mainly funded by the European Union, Spanish government and private companies, and has published a large number of refereed papers in international journals and conferences. Dr. Ruiz received in 2007 an outstanding research trajectory recognition from the Spanish MEC. He is in the editorial board for the Elsevier Computer Communications Journal, the International Journal on Parallel, Emergent, and Distributed Systems, and the International Journal of Network Management. He has served as Chair in the organization of multiple conferences and workshops including among others IEEE Infocom, ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc, IEEE MASS, etc. His main research interests include vehicular networks, sensor networks, mobile and ad hoc wireless networks and distributed systems. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE Communications Society.

View full text

Efficient rate allocation, routing and channel assignment in wireless mesh networks supporting dynamic traffic flows

Abstract

Section snippets

Introduction and motivation

Related work

Joint routing, channel assignment and rate allocation problem

JRCAR: Joint Routing, Channel Assignment and Rate allocation Heuristic

Numerical results

Simulation experiments

Conclusions

J. Parallel Distrib. Comput.

Charging and rate control for elastic traffic

Eur. Trans. Telecommun.

Centralized channel assignment and routing algorithms for multi-channel wireless mesh networks

SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev.

Maximum throughput and fair bandwidth allocation in multi-channel wireless mesh networks

Joint logical topology design, interface assignment, channel allocation, and routing for multi-channel wireless mesh networks

IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun.

A channel and rate assignment algorithm and a layer-2.5 forwarding paradigm for multi-radio wireless mesh networks

IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw.

Distributed and provably efficient algorithms for joint channel-assignment, scheduling, and routing in multichannel ad hoc wireless networks

IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw.

Routing and link-layer protocols for multi-channel multi-interface ad hoc wireless networks

SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev.

A multi-radio 802.11 mesh network architecture

Mob. Netw. Appl.