Experimental comparison of algorithms for interference control in ad-hoc wireless networks

Interference is an issue of outstanding importance for efficient communication in ad-hoc wireless networks. Interference arises due to overlapping transmission power levels of nodes and causes message collisions that require energy-consuming retransmissions. In this work we study algorithms for interference control in ad-hoc wireless networks in the Euclidean space that aim at constructing low-interference network topologies with particular properties preserving network connectivity. We survey relative research work on such algorithms and provide implementations for four such algorithms comparing them on random geometric instances of the problem in the Euclidean space in average-case networks. Our experiments show that our implementations obtain in practice improved performance compared to corresponding theoretical bounds. Our findings confirm that sparse topologies do not automatically imply low interference and, furthermore, imply that a unified model for decreasing simultaneously both edge- and node-interference remains hard to define.