A Framework for Opportunistic Allocation of Wireless Resources

Wireless multi-hop, mesh networks are being considered as a candidate to backhaul data traffic from access networks to the wired Internet. To enhance system performance, scheduling algorithms for wireless mesh networks are desirable to take advantage of multi-user diversity resulted from time-varying channel condition and space-varying path loss. Although many existing scheduling algorithms or medium access protocols have been adopted for the wireless mesh networks, they do not perform well, given that the algorithms are devised for wireless access. In this paper, we study the computational complexity in finding the optimal schedule for a mesh network with time-division-duplexing (TDD) operations. We propose a novel heuristic distributed scheduling framework for wireless mesh networks with open definitions of utility function. Performance analysis shows that our proposed framework is of polynomial-time complexity. Simulation results compare our framework with the tree-structural approach, and reveal that our proposed framework is highly capable of selecting and scheduling links with high utility in a fully distributed manner.