Enhanced Rank Based Cooperative Game (ERBCG) strategy for IEEE 802.11s Mesh WLAN power management

IEEE 802.11s Mesh WLAN is a promising access network standard launched for the aim of enhancing channels´ utilization, coverage extension with simple and cheap network deployment. Mesh WLAN faces challenges in power management, channel assignment, traffic forwarding, admission control, security and coexistence with other technologies. The main objective of this paper is to increase the mesh WLAN throughput by adjusting the mesh nodes´ transmission power. Increasing the node´s transmission power increases its users´ bit rate but in the same time increases the interference on the neighboring nodes, hence decreasing their bit rates and the overall throughput. Power management also controls the users and mesh nodes connectivity, the number of hops to the gateway and traffic forwarding. This paper proposes a new power management algorithm; Enhanced Rank Based Cooperative Game (ERBCG) algorithm, as an enhancement for the Rank-based algorithm in the literature to optimize the average users´ data rates and minimize the algorithm iterations. The Rank-based algorithm showed better performance than the non-cooperative game Nash equilibriums and a comparable result with the optimum power assignment. Results of the ERBCG algorithm proves that the proposed algorithm significantly increases the uplink and downlink average user´s data rates and thus enhancing the overall network throughput while significantly decreasing the number of power management iterations to less than half the number consumed by the Rank-based algorithm, which results in less overhead and reduced latency in mesh nodes power adjustment.