An Integrated Routing and Scheduling Approach for Persistent Vehicle Communication in Mobile WiMAX Mesh Networks

The U.S. military has recently announced plans to evaluate the IEEE 802.16e Mobile WiMAX technology's potentials as a fast deployable solution for building a broadband tactical communication network. Specifically, the technology's provisions of mesh mode operation and terminal mobility allow a tactical network to be quickly deployed among mobile base stations and mobile battle units. The technology provides essential support for mesh connectivity and fast handover, while an overall deployment strategy and higher layer protocols remain to be established. This paper presents a practical network organization scheme and an integrated routing and link scheduling approach to enable persistent communication of fast moving ground vehicles over a mesh-mode Mobile WiMAX tactical backbone network. The solution exploits the mobile units' mobility pattern and the Mobile WiMAX handover modes to optimize persistent communication with minimal disruption and signaling overheads. Simulations are conducted in ns-2 to assess the efficacy of the proposed methods.