Joint Power-Frequency-Time Resource Allocation in Clustered Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networking is an emerging technology for future broadband wireless access. Future wireless networking can benefit from a robust and reliable wireless mesh backbone rendered by mesh routers, providing an all-wireless ambience. Due to the requisite multichannel communications for high-speed data transmissions, power allocation for opportunistically exploiting fading wireless channels, and packet scheduling for QoS provisioning, joint power-frequency-time resource allocation is indispensable. In this article we propose a low-complexity intracluster resource allocation algorithm, taking power allocation, subcarrier allocation, and packet scheduling into consideration. Numerical results demonstrate that our scheme is near optimal, and that our optimality-driven resource allocation approach outperforms a greedy algorithm, working out a better performance compromise among throughput, packet dropping rate, and packet delay.