Fault Tolerant Interference-Aware Topology Control for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Interference imposes a major challenge for efficient data communication in wireless networks. Increased level of interference may increase number of collisions, energy consumption and latency due to retransmissions of the interfered data. Interference of a link is the number of nodes interfered while a pair of nodes are communicating over a bi-directional link. Approaches have been proposed to reduce interference by dropping links that create high interference. However, dropping links make a network more susceptible to node failure/departure–a frequent phenomenon in ad hoc networks. Thus dropping high interference links while keeping the network significantly connected is an important goal to achieve. In this paper, we formulate the problem of constructing minimum interference path preserving and fault tolerant wireless ad hoc networks and then provide algorithms, both centralized and distributed with local information, to solve the problem. Moreover, for the first time in literature, we conceive the concept of fault tolerant interference spanner and provide a local algorithm to construct such spanner of a communication graph.