Exploiting Spectral Reuse in Routing, Resource Allocation, and Scheduling for IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks

The IEEE 802.16 standard for wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs) is defined to meet the need for wide-range broadband wireless access at low cost. The objective of this paper is to study how to exploit spectral reuse in resource allocation in an IEEE 802.16 mesh network, which includes routing tree construction (RTC), bandwidth allocation, time-slot assignment, and bandwidth guarantee of real-time flows. The proposed spectral reuse framework covers bandwidth allocation at the application layer, RTC and resource sharing at the medium access control (MAC) layer, and channel reuse at the physical layer. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that formally quantifies spectral reuse in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks and exploits spectral efficiency under an integrated framework. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes significantly improve the throughput of IEEE 802.16 mesh networks.