Optimal Power Control Algorithm for Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless mesh networks (MRMC WMNs) is the self-configuring backhaul providing internet access for last mile users through multi-hop forwarding. The increasing demand for low cost wireless networks coverage has motivated a high interest in multi-hop communications based recent and significant IEEE 802.11s WMN standard. One of the main challenges being faced by WMN is co-channel interference. Co-channel interference badly affects the WMN and degrades the network performance. Power control is an effective means for reducing the co-channel interference. Power control plays a very important role in order to restrict the transmission range as well as interference range and prevent unwanted interference between various nodes. By controlling the transmission power of each node up to desired transmission range, the co-channel interference can be reduced and improves the network performance. Transmitter gain, receiver gain, receiving threshold value, distance between nodes are the important factors that must be considered to find required minimum transmission power. Most of the existing work simply assume that each transmitter should use the fixed minimum transmit power needed to reach its receiver, and this would maximize the network capacity by reducing the cochannel interference. This paper proposes an Optimal Power Control algorithm to find the minimum transmission power required for each node based on the above important factors and its effect has been analyzed in terms of throughput, packet delay and packet loss. It has been observed that the proposed algorithm performs better and obtained better results as compare to the fixed power allocation approach.