Joint stream allocation and scheduling for single-user MIMO communication in WMNs

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology has great potential for improving the throughput of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). In this paper, we investigate the joint stream allocation and scheduling problem for single-user MIMO communication in WMNs with the objective of maximizing the demand satisfaction for a set of flows. The notion of transmission configuration (TC) is introduced and a heuristic algorithm is proposed to find a good subset of all possible TCs. Using these TCs, the joint stream allocation and scheduling problem is formulated as a linear programming (LP) and a convex program (CP) to obtain the maximum throughput and proportional fair solutions. To find the optimal solutions, we also introduce a scheme to enumerate all possible TCs. The simulation results demonstrate that performance of the proposed heuristic algorithm is very near to the optimal solution. The computational complexity of the proposed heuristic algorithm is substantially less compared to the optimal. In addition, we show that as the number of antennas increases, the demand satisfaction and the network throughput increase linearly.