A Fair Routing Algorithm Based on Power Control and Channel Allocation

The multi-frequency multi-channel wireless mesh networks (MRMC-WMN) have received extensive attention due to their excellent performance-throughput, robustness, and low cost. Maximizing the overall throughput of the network can lead to traffic shortages or grossly unfair ratios between traffic. Traditional schemes aim to improve throughput by ignoring fairness. Decreased fairness causes nodes to use unnecessarily higher power, meaning higher interference, affecting parallel transmissions and higher data rates. This paper proposes a jointly routing algorithm with PC and CA (JPCRA) to seek routing, power and per-flow channel schemes to improve fairness performance. First, consider the available channels and power levels, known as the routing metric of minimum flow, based on physical interference and a Shannon-designed channel model. The proposed JPCRA based on the Genetic Algorithm (GA) solves this non-deterministic polynomial-time hard problem (NP-Hard) using simulated annealing to maximize the minimum flow. The MRMC-WMN backbone network based on IEEE 802.11 is simulated, and the simulation results show that JPCRA achieves better fairness and higher network throughput among different flows.