Consort: Node-Constrained Opportunistic Routing in wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic routing is proposed to improve the performance of wireless networks by exploiting the broadcast nature and spatial diversity of the wireless medium. In this paper, we study the problems of how to choose opportunistic route for each user to optimize the total utility or profit of multiple simultaneous users in a wireless mesh network (WMN) subject to node constraints. We formulate these two problems as two convex programming systems. By combining primal-dual and subgradient methods, we present a distributed iterative algorithm Consort (node-Constrained Opportunistic Routing). In each iteration, Consort updates Lagrange multipliers in a distributed manner according to the user and node behaviors obtained in the previous iteration, and then each user and each node individually adjusts its own behavior based on the updated Lagrange multipliers. We prove the convergence of this iterative algorithm, and provide bounds on the amount of feasibility violation and the gap between our solution and the optimal solution in each iteration.