A Survey of Network Design Problems and Joint Design Approaches in Wireless Mesh Networks

Over the last decade, the paradigm of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) has matured to a reasonably commonly understood one, and there has been extensive research on various areas related to WMNs such as design, deployment, protocols, performance, etc. The quantity of research being conducted in the area of wireless mesh design has dramatically increased in the past few years, due to increasing interest in this paradigm as its potential for the "last few miles", and the possibility of significant wireless services in metropolitan area networks. This recent work has focused increasingly on joint design problems, together with studies in designing specific aspects of the WMN such as routing, power control etc. in isolation. While excellent surveys and tutorials pertaining to WMNs exist in literature, the explosive growth of research in the area of specific design issues, and especially joint design, has left them behind. Our objective in this paper is to identify the fundamental WMN design problems of interference modeling, power control, topology control, link scheduling, and routing, and provide brief overviews, together with a survey of the recent research on these topics, with special stress on joint design methods. We believe this paper will fulfill an outstanding need in informing the interested student and researcher in getting familiar with this abundant recent research area, and starting research.