A novel cross-layer mesh router placement scheme for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) offer a great promise in supporting ubiquitous multimedia Internet access for mobile or fixed mesh clients (MCs). In WMNs, Internet traffic from MCs is aggregated by serving mesh router (MR) and forwarded hop-by-hop by MRs to an internet gateway (IGW) or vice versa. While deploying MRs and IGWs, intricate relationships among antenna types, wireless links with adaptive modulation and coding, MAC scheduling, routing, and equipment cost render the network planning an extremely complex problem. This article presents a novel cross-layer MR placement (CMRP) scheme that can cope up with this issue. CMRP encapsulates the cross-layer metrics into three underlying attributes: Local Coverage (LC), Backbone Residual Capacity (BRC), and Deployment Cost (DC), and are used to minimize the network deployment cost. Coupled with our proposed novel tree-based minimal cost routing scheme and weight-based link assignment for user coverage, we are able to plan the design of WMNs efficiently. Extensive simulations have been performed to examine the performance and feasibility of CMRP and compared with existing design schemes based on coverage, connectivity, and combination of the two. The result demonstrates that our approach outperforms existing schemes both in the cost performance ratio and potential implementation feasibility.