Min-Max Congestion in Interference-Prone Wireless Mesh Networks

Users' demand of seamless connectivity has pushed for the development of alternatives to traditional infrastructure networks. Potential solutions should be low-cost, easily deployable and adaptive to the environment. One approach that has gained tremendous attention over the past few years consists in deploying a backbone of access points wirelessly interconnected, offering users access to the wired infrastructure via multi-hop communication. However, the limited transfer capacities and the interference resulting from a shared transmission medium can prevent further deployment if the network performance does not meet users' expectations. In this work, we explore different ways to improve the nominal network capacity while accounting for the phenomena of intra-interference (interference on a single path) and inter-interference (interference among flows on different paths). In particular, under the assumptions of splitable traffic flows, we present an interference-aware linear- programming formulation of the min-max congestion problem with and without constraints on the path length. Finally, we evaluate via simulations the potential bandwidth capacity gain resulting from the implementation of these different approaches.