Applications of Geometric Algorithms to Reduce Interference in Wireless Mesh Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric algorithm-based approach to reduce radio interference in wireless mesh networks by converting network issues into geometric problems and applying algorithms like plan sweep, Voronoi diagrams, and Delaunay triangulation.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid geometric algorithm method to minimize interference in wireless mesh networks, improving performance with an efficient O(n log n) solution.

Findings

Significant interference reduction demonstrated

Efficient O(n log n) algorithm complexity achieved

Effective link pruning based on standard deviation

Abstract

In wireless mesh networks such as WLAN (IEEE 802.11s) or WMAN (IEEE 802.11), each node should help to relay packets of neighboring nodes toward gateway using multi-hop routing mechanisms. Wireless mesh networks usually intensively deploy mesh nodes to deal with the problem of dead spot communication. However, the higher density of nodes deployed, the higher radio interference occurred. This causes significant degradation of system performance. In this paper, we first convert network problems into geometry problems in graph theory, and then solve the interference problem by geometric algorithms. We first define line intersection in a graph to reflect radio interference problem in a wireless mesh network. We then use plan sweep algorithm to find intersection lines, if any; employ Voronoi diagram algorithm to delimit the regions among nodes; use Delaunay Triangulation algorithm to reconstruct the graph in order to minimize the interference among nodes. Finally, we use standard deviation to prune off those longer links (higher interference links) to have a further enhancement. The proposed hybrid solution is proved to be able to significantly reduce interference in a wireless mesh network in O(n log n) time complexity.