Disjoint path protection in multi-hop wireless networks with interference constraints

We consider the problem of providing protection against failures in wireless networks by using disjoint paths. Disjoint path routing is commonly used in wired networks for protection, but due to the interference between transmitting nodes in a wireless setting, this approach has not been previously examined for wireless networks. In this paper, we develop a non-disruptive and resource-efficient disjoint path scheme that guarantees protection in wireless networks by utilizing capacity "recapturing" after a failure. Using our scheme, protection can oftentimes be provided for all demands using no additional resources beyond what was required without any protection. We show that the problem of disjoint path protection in wireless networks is not only NP-hard, but in fact remains NP-hard to approximate. We provide an ILP formulation to find an optimal solution, and develop corresponding time-efficient algorithms. Our approach utilizes 87% less protection resources on average than the traditional disjoint path routing scheme. For the case of 2-hop interference, which corresponds to the IEEE 802.11 standard, our protection scheme requires only 8% more resources on average than providing no protection whatsoever.