Energy-efficient radio resource management in self-organised multi-radio wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks are an efficient and low-cost solution for providing last-mile broadband Internet access. They face numerous challenges related to intrinsic characteristics of the multi-hop environment and flow of traffic. An energy-efficient and load-aware strategy is proposed for the unified management of radio resources of multi-radio nodes, combining channel assignment, rate adaptation, power control and max-min fairness mechanisms. It exploits 100% of the network capacity, achieving the maximum throughput, minimising spectrum and power usage. For a network of 13 dual-radio mesh nodes based on IEEE 802.11a, by using OPNET Modeler, one concludes that 4 channels and a total transmitted power of 34.5 dBm are sufficient to achieve an aggregated throughput of 4.8 Mbps per mesh point.