OFDMA-Based Channel-Width Adaptation in Wireless Mesh Networks

Channel-width adaptation can optimize multiple performance metrics of a wireless communication link, including transmission rate, communication range, resilience to delay spread, and power consumption. Supporting variable channel width has been considered one of the most critical features of a communication radio. How to leverage a channel-width adaptive radio to improve throughput of a wireless network is a challenging problem in the medium access control (MAC) layer. So far, there exist research results on either theoretical analysis or protocol implementation for a point-to-multipoint (PMP) infrastructure network. However, the impact of channel width to a multihop wireless network has not been fully investigated yet. More specifically, how to exploit variable channel width to enhance throughput of a multihop wireless network remains an unresolved research issue. This paper addresses this issue in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) considering orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA)-based channel-width adaptation. Theoretical analysis is first carried out to identify appropriate algorithms for channel width adaptation. To this end, resource allocation with OFDMA-based channel-width adaptation is formulated as an optimization problem, which is proved to be NP-complete. To reduce the computational complexity, a greedy algorithm is derived to obtain a suboptimal solution. Based on such a greedy algorithm, a distributed MAC protocol is designed for channel-width adaptation for OFDMA-based WMNs. It takes advantage of variable channel width in different time slots to achieve highly efficient resource allocation. Simulation results illustrate that the distributed MAC protocol significantly outperforms MAC protocols based on traditional channel-width adaptation.