Optimal Control of Transmission Power Management in Wireless Backbone Mesh Networks

The remarkable evolution of wireless networks into the next generation to provide ubiquitous and seamless broadband applications has recently triggered the emergence of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). The WMNs comprise stationary Wireless Mesh Routers (WMRs) forming Wireless Backbone Mesh Networks (WBMNs) and mobile Wireless Mesh Clients (WMCs) forming the WMN access. While WMCs are limited in function and radio resources, the WMRs are expected to support heavy duty applications, that is, WMRs have gateway and bridge functions to integrate WMNs with other networks such as the Internet, cellular, IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15, IEEE 802.16, sensor networks, et cetera (Akyildiz & Wang, 2009). Consequently, WMRs are constructed from fast switching radios or multiple radio devices operating on multiple frequency channels. WMRs are expected to be self-organized, self-configured and constitute a reliable and robust WBMN which needs to sustain high traffic volumes and long online time. Such complex functional and structural aspects of the WBMNs yield additional challenges in terms of providing quality of services (QoS)(Li et al., 2009). Therefore, the main objective of this investigation is to develop a decentralized transmission power management (TPM) solution maintained at the Link-Layer (LL) of the protocol stack for the purpose of maximizing the network capacity of WBMNs while minimizing energy consumption and maintaining fault-tolerant network connectivity. In order to maximize network capacity, this chapter proposes a scalable singularlyperturbed weakly-coupled TPM which is supported at the LL of the network protocol stack. Firstly, the WMN is divided into sets of unified channel graphs (UCGs). A UCG consists of multiple radios, interconnected to each other via a common wireless medium. A unique frequency channel is then assigned to each UCG. A multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) node possesses network interface cards (NICs), each tuned to a single UCG during the network operation. Secondly, the TPM problems are modelled as a singular-perturbation of both energy and packet evolutions at the queue system as well as a weak-coupling problem, owing to the interference across adjacent multiple channels. Based on these models, an