Impacts of Channel Switching Overhead on the Performance of Multicast in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising technology for next generation wireless networking. A WMN extends network coverage using wireless mesh routers that communicate with each other via multi-hop wireless communications. One technique to increase the network capacity of WMNs is to use routers equipped with multiple radios capable of transmitting and receiving on multiple channels. In a Multi-Channel Multi-Radio wireless mesh network (MCMR WMN), nodes are capable of transmitting and receiving data simultaneously through different radios and at least theoretically doubling the average throughput. On the other hand, the use of multi-radio and multi-channel technology in many cases requires routers to switch channels for each transmission and/or reception. Channel switching incurs additional costs and delay. In this thesis, we present a simulation-based study of the impacts of channel switching overheads on the performance of multicast in MCMR WMNs. We study how channel switching overheads affect the performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, throughput, end-to-end delay, and delay jitter of a multicast session. In particular, we examine: 1. the performance of multicast in MCMR WMNs with three orthogonal channels versus eleven overlapping channels defined in IEEE 802.11b. 2. the performance of the Minimum-interference Multi-channel Multi-radio Multicast (M4) algorithm with and without channel switching. 3. the performance of the Multi-Channel Minimum Number of Transmissions (MCMNT) algorithm (which does not do channel switching) in comparison with the M4 algorithm (which performs channel switching)

Joint Channel Assignment and Opportunistic Routing for Maximizing Throughput in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we consider the joint opportunistic routing and channel assignment problem in multi-channel multi-radio (MCMR) cognitive radio networks (CRNs) for improving aggregate throughput of the secondary users. We first present the nonlinear programming optimization model for this joint problem, taking into account the feature of CRNs-channel uncertainty. Then considering the queue state of a node, we propose a new scheme to select proper forwarding candidates for opportunistic routing. Furthermore, a new algorithm for calculating the forwarding probability of any packet at a node is proposed, which is used to calculate how many packets a forwarder should send, so that the duplicate transmission can be reduced compared with MAC-independent opportunistic routing & encoding (MORE) [11]. Our numerical results show that the proposed scheme performs significantly better that traditional routing and opportunistic routing in which channel assignment strategy is employed.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Proc. of IEEE GlobeCom 201