OLSR-Aware cross-layer channel access scheduling in wireless mesh networks

A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a communications network in which the nodes are organized to form a mesh topology. WMNs are expected to resolve the limitations and significantly improve the performance of wireless ad-hoc, local area, personal area, and metropolitan area networks, which is the reason that they are experiencing fast-breaking progress and deployments. WMNs typically employ spatial TDMA (STDMA) based channel access schemes which are suitable for the high traffic demands of WMNs. Current research trends focus on using loosening the strict layered network implementation in order to look for possible ways of performance improvements. In this thesis, we propose two STDMA-based cross-layer OLSR-Aware channel access scheduling schemes (one distributed, one centralized) that aim better utilizing the network capacity and increasing the overall application throughput by using OLSR-specific routing layer information in link layer scheduling. The proposed centralized algorithm provides a modification of the traditional vertex coloring algorithm while the distributed algorithm is a fully distributed pseudo-random algorithm in which each node makes decisions using local information. Proposed schemes are compared against one another and against their Non-OLSR-Aware versions via extensive ns-2 simulations. Our simulation results indicate that MAC layer can obtain OLSR-specific information with no extra control overhead and utilizing OLSR-specific information significantly improves the overall network performance both in distributed and centralized schemes. We further show that link layer algorithms that target the maximization of concurrent slot allocations do not necessarily increase the application throughput.