Combined routing, channel scheduling, and power control in packet radio ad hoc networks with cellular overlay

We present the development of a framework for a high capacity wireless network for Internet applications. By replacing some of the network nodes with wireless routers, we form a wireless multihop network overlaid an a cellular structure. This paper addresses the problem of jointly optimizing routing, channel scheduling, and power control to maximin the total system throughput under a transmit power constraint. We demonstrate that by considering the interrelationship among the network, data link, and physical layers, we increase the network throughput. The work is based on minimizing a defined objective function which includes the cost related to the transmit power for emptying the buffer with a certain amount of information and the selected route to the final destination.

I. Introduction

In recent years, wireless communications, most notably wireless telephony, has experienced tremendous growth, and it is expected that wireless access to data services and the Internet will show similar expansion in the near future. A promising method for wireless access to both data and multimedia services is to integrate an ad hoc network with the expansive cellular infrastructure [1], [2]. This allows for any mobile station (MS) to act as a relay in routing/forwarding packets toward any base station (BS) in the upstream and toward other mobile stations in the downstream. For clarity and without loss of generality, we assume here that the terminal and router functions are assigned separately to individual entities in the radio network. Hence, a router will not be a source or destination for traffic and is likely located in the network randomly.