Link Scheduling and Power Control in Wireless Mesh Networks with Directional Antennas

Abstract

Directional antennas are very attractive in wireless mesh networks (WMN). We study the problem of link scheduling and power control in a time-division multiple access (TDMA) WMN where the nodes use directional antennas. This is a cross- layer design problem spanning the physical and the link layers. Link scheduling in WMNs requires careful modeling of interference. Interference models used for omni-directional antennas cannot be used for directional antennas. We develop a generalized interference model applicable to directional antennas. Then, we use this model to formulate the link scheduling and power control problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Program. We also propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem efficiently.