Maximum Multipath Routing Throughput in Multirate Wireless Mesh Networks

TL;DR

This paper addresses maximizing routing throughput in multirate wireless mesh networks by proposing an algorithm that jointly optimizes paths and schedules, demonstrating up to 100% throughput increase over single-path routing.

Contribution

It formulates the multipath routing problem with collision-free scheduling and introduces a pruning algorithm to improve throughput in WMNs.

Findings

Multipath routing can double throughput compared to single-path routing.

The proposed algorithm effectively optimizes path selection and scheduling.

Maximum throughput gains of up to 100% demonstrated in simple WMNs.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the maximum routing throughput between any pair of nodes in an arbitrary multirate wireless mesh network (WMN) using multiple paths. Multipath routing is an efficient technique to maximize routing throughput in WMN, however maximizing multipath routing throughput is a NP-complete problem due to the shared medium for electromagnetic wave transmission in wireless channel, inducing collision-free scheduling as part of the optimization problem. In this work, we first provide problem formulation that incorporates collision-free schedule, and then based on this formulation we design an algorithm with search pruning that jointly optimizes paths and transmission schedule. Though suboptimal, compared to the known optimal single path flow, we demonstrate that an efficient multipath routing scheme can increase the routing throughput by up to 100% for simple WMNs.