Joint Routing and Scheduling Optimization in Wireless Mesh Networks with Directional Antennas

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have recently emerged as a technology for next-generation wireless networking. WMNs partially replace wired backbone networks, and it is therefore reasonable to plan carefully radio resource assignment to provide quality guarantees to traffic flows. Directional transmissions allow to reduce radio interference, thus exploiting spatial reuse. Therefore, as a main contribution, in this paper we study the joint routing and scheduling optimization problem in Wireless Mesh Networks where nodes are equipped with directional antennas. To this aim, we assume a Spatial reuse Time Division Multiple Access (STDMA) scheme, a dynamic power control able to vary the emitted power slot-by-slot, and a rate adaptation mechanism that sets transmission rates according to the Signal- to-Interference-and-Noise Ratio (SINR). We provide column generation-based heuristic approaches for the proposed models in a set of realistic-size instances and discuss the impact of different parameters on the network performance. The results show that our schemes increase considerably the total traffic accepted by the network, providing bounds to the achievable performance.