Resource allocation in city-wide real-time wireless mesh networks

To support real-time communication, multi-radio multi-channel city-wide WMNs (Wireless Mesh Networks) are studied in this paper. In the studied WMNs, a WMN router is equipped with two communication interfaces/radios, one is working on 2.4GHz for the client accessing, and the other is working on 5GHz for the backhaul communication. First, a greedy static channel assignment algorithm for access interfaces is proposed to minimize the maximum interference among all the access interfaces. The proposed greedy algorithm has an approximation factor of 2-1/m, where m is the number of available orthogonal channels of access interfaces. To guarantee interference-free communications for all links, a slot allocation algorithm, combining with the channel assignment for backhaul interfaces, is suggested. The slot allocation algorithm is based on the fixed priorities assigned to real-time flows. After that, the worst-case end-to-end delay analysis of each flow under the slot and channel allocation algorithms is given. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the delay analysis and the channel assignment and slot allocation algorithms.