An efficient CG-based approach for joint routing and scheduling in MIMO-based WMNs

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging as a cost effective solution for last-mile broadband access. Multiple antennas or multiple input multiple output (MIMO)-based systems have the potential for improving the capacity of these networks manifolds. However, unique physical layer characteristics associated with MIMO-based systems require joint design among physical layer and upper layers. In this paper, we investigate the problem of jointly optimizing routing and stream control scheduling in a MIMO-based WMN, where multiple antennas are exploited to increase the capacity via spatial reuse (SR) and/or spatial multiplexing (SM). A column generation (CG) method is used to efficiently solved the problem. For the difficult pricing problem that arises in the CG procedure, we propose a computationally efficient heuristic algorithm. A combination of dual decomposition and gradient-based methods are used to decouple the network layer and link layer operations. Simulation results are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.