Heterogeneous Interface Configuration in Wireless Mesh Networks

The network performance such as node capacity in a wireless mesh network (WMN) could be limited due to inappropriate interface configuration. Mesh routers (MRs) with heavy load may suffer from interface shortage. On the other hand, a MR with less load experiences a low utilization of interfaces. In this paper, we advocate heterogeneous interface configuration to appropriately configure the MRs\´ interfaces. It achieves the purpose of minimizing the total number of interfaces in a WMN while guaranteeing the various constraints such as traffic demand. We first formulate the problem when the traffic demand is non-uniformly distributed. On the basis of theoretical analysis, we propose a heuristic algorithm to find a ";close-to- optimal"; solution for interface configuration. Our simulation shows the effectiveness of our proposed heuristic algorithm.