Efficient approaches to resource allocation in MIMO-based wireless mesh networks

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) communications have shown great promise in providing high spectral efficiency for wireless mesh networks. We have proposed CrossLayerMethod [1] to solve the resource allocation problem including joint routing, scheduling, and power control for MIMO-based mesh networks. However, the computation complexity is prohibitively expensive for networks with more than ten nodes. The goal of this work is to develop efficient approaches including ProtocolMethod, ProtocolWithActualMethod and SequentialMethod, to solve the resource allocation problem for moderate to large MIMO-based mesh networks. Among them, ProtocolWithActualMethod, a two-step approach, achieves the compromise of performance and computation complexity. The first step implements ProtocolMethod, which applies the iterative approach proposed in [2] to solve the problem without considering interference among MIMO links. The second step is to compute the actual throughput over the set of assignments found in first step. Large numbers of numerical experiments are used to show the performance of these methods.