Wireless mesh networks allowing intra-link errors: CEO problem viewpoint

In this paper, we re-formulate an issue related to wireless mesh networks (WMNs) from a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) problem viewpoint, and provide a practical solution to a simple case of the problem. The problem is described as follows: an originator broadcasts its binary source information to several forwarding nodes over Binary Symmetric Channels (BSC); the originator's source information suffers from independent random binary errors; at the forwarding nodes, they just further interleave, encode the received bit sequence, and then forward it, without correcting errors that may be happening in the originator-forwarding node links (intra-links), to the final destination (FD) over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channels. This strategy reduces the complexity of the forwarding node significantly. A joint decoding technique at the FD is proposed by using the correlation knowledge between intralinks. The bit-error-rate (BER) performances show that the originator's information can be reconstructed at the FD even by using a very simple coding scheme. Moreover, we provide BER performance comparison between joint decoding and separate decoding strategies. The optimization of coding rate at originator side is also considered in this paper. The simulation results show that excellent performance can be achieved by the proposed system. Furthermore, extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis is performed to investigate convergency property of the proposed technique.