Autonomous Transmission Power Adaptation for Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-Radio Multi-Channel (MRMC) systems are key to power control problems in WMNs. Previous studies have emphasized throughput maximization in such systems as the main design challenge and transmission power control treated as a secondary issue. In this paper, we present an autonomous power adaptation for MRMC WMNs. The transmit power is dynamically adapted by each network interface card (NIC) in response to the locally available energy in a node, queue load, and interference states of a channel. To achieve this, WMN is first represented as a set of Unified Channel Graphs (UCGs). Second, each NIC of a node is tuned to a UCG. Third, a power selection MRMC unification protocol (PMMUP) that coordinates Interaction variables (IV) from different UCGs and Unification variables (UV) from higher layers is proposed. PMMUP coordinates autonomous power optimization by the NICs of a node. The efficacy of the proposed method is investigated through simulations.