Building Robust Wireless Mesh Networks Using Directional Antennas: How Many Radios are Enough?

File(s)
Date
2007Author
Dong, Qunfeng
Bijerano, Yigal
Publisher
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Computer Sciences
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Recently, wireless mesh technology has been used for
military applications and fast recovery networks, referred
to as nomadic wireless mesh networks (NWMNs).
In such systems, wireless routers, termed nodes, are
mounted on top of vehicles or vessels. The vessels may
change their location according to application needs
and the nodes are required to establish a broadband
and reliable wireless mesh network. For improving network
performance, some vendors use directional antennas
and the mesh topology comprises of point-to-point
connections between adjacent nodes. Consequently, the
number of point-to-point connections of a node is upperbounded
by the number of directional radios (and antennas)
that it has, which is typically a small constant.
This raises the need to build robust (i.e., two-node/edgeconnected)
mesh networks with bounded node degree,
regardless of node locations. This paper is the first
to present practical solutions with provable properties
for constructing efficient and robust wireless mesh networks
using directional antennas. First, we formulate
the design problem to be theoretically equivalent to
the construction of bounded degree two-connected mesh
topologies. Then, we present elegant schemes for constructing
such solutions with small constant degree bounds.
Finally, our extensive simulations show that our schemes
find robust and efficient topologies for practical settings
with node degree bounded by 4, while preserving small
hop-count distance between nodes and gateways.
Permanent Link
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/60518Type
Technical Report
Citation
TR1572