On capacity optimization in multi-radio multi-channel wireless networks with directional antennas

Exploiting multiple radio interfaces over multiple channels and using directional antennas are promising technologies to enhance the performance of wireless networks. However, in such a multi-dimensional network resource space, assignment of radios and channels and configuration of antenna directions are coupled, making the complexity for network capacity optimization dramatically increase. Existing work has considered either multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) networks or networks with directional antennas (DA); however, there lacks a generic framework for such complex MRMC-DA wireless networks. In this paper, we employ the tuple concept to define Link- Radio-Antenna-Channel tuple links, which are then utilized as building blocks to construct a multi-dimensional conflict graph (MDCG) of the MRMC-DA network. The MDCG model facilitates mapping the original MRMC-DA network into a simple virtual single-radio single-channel network, on which the capacity optimization problem can be formulated as a linear program. To circumvent searching the exponentially many independent sets, we apply the delayed column generation method to design our algorithm. Simulations demonstrate the performance of the proposed method and analyze the different effects of the numbers of channels, radios and antenna choices.