Dynamic Power Control for Wireless Backbone Mesh Networks: a Survey

Abstract

With the tremendous growth of wireless networks into the next generation to provide better services, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged to offer ubiquitous communication and seamless broadband applications. WMNs are hybrid networks composed of a mixture of static Wireless Mesh Routers (WMRs) and mobile Wireless Mesh Clients (WMCs) interconnected via wireless links to form a multi-hop wireless Ad Hoc network (WANET). WMNs are self-organized, self-configured, and reliable against single points of failures, and robust against RF interference, obstacles or power outage. This is because WMRs forming wireless backbone mesh networks (WBMNs) are built on advanced physical technologies. Such nodes perform both accessing and forwarding functionality. They are expected to carry huge volumes of traffic and be "on power" at all times. While trying to increase network capacity, problems of the dynamic transmission power control (DTPC) arise in such networks. Such problems include RF Interference, Connectivity and energy-depletion. While there are numerous studies on this topic, contributions in the context of WBMNs are still challenging but interesting research areas. This paper provides an overview of the DTPC algorithms central to the WBMNs framework. The open issues are also highlighted.

Optimal Control of Transmission Power Management in Wireless Backbone Mesh Networks

“…While the xRDT uses one packet interface and one busy tone interface, the LCM MAC uses a single packet interface only. Through extensive simulations, these protocols yield superior performance relative to the control channel based protocols (Olwal et al, 2010b). However, issues of optimal TPM for packet and busy tone exchanges remained untackled.…”

“…Finally, analytical results indicate that the optimal TPM resolves WMN capacity problems. Several simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed solution compared to those of recently studied techniques (Olwal et al, 2010b). The work in (Olwal et al, 2010b), furnishes an extensive review of the TPM schemes.…”

“…Several simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed solution compared to those of recently studied techniques (Olwal et al, 2010b). The work in (Olwal et al, 2010b), furnishes an extensive review of the TPM schemes. In this chapter, however, only key contributions related to the MRMC LL schemes are outlined.…”

“…PMMUP mainly coordinates local power optimizations at the NICs, while NICs measure local channel conditions (Olwal et al, 2009b). Several research papers have demonstrated the significance of the multiple frequency channels in capacity enhancement of wireless networks (Maheshwari et al, 2006;Thomas et al, 2007;Wang et al, 2006;Olwal et al, 2010b Thomas et al, 2007;Wang et al, 2006;Muqattash & Krunz, 2005), while some offer topology control mechanisms (Zhu et al, 2008;Li et al, 2008). Indeed, still other solutions have tackled cross-layer resource allocation problems (Merlin et al, 2007;Olwal et al, 2009a;2009b).…”

“…In order to address MRMC topology control issues, Zhu et al (2008) proposed a distributed topology control (DTC) and the associated inter-layer interfacing architecture for efficient channel-interface resource allocation in the MRMC mesh networks. In DTC, channel and interfaces are allocated dynamically as opposed to the conventional TPMs (Olwal et al, 2010b). By dynamically assigning channels to the MRMC radios, the link connectivity, topology, and capacity are changed.…”