An Efficient Link Scheduler for MIMO Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

The capacity of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) can be improved significantly using multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology. The Degree of Freedoms (DoFs) or antenna elements available at each node enable concurrent transmission/reception of multiple independent data streams or can be used to suppress interference. In this paper, we study the problem of minimizing the Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) superframe length, in terms of slots, of a multi transmit/receive MIMO-based WMN. We propose a novel heuristic algorithm named Algo-MIMO that uses a recently proposed node ordering DoF model for Interference Cancellation (IC). Numerical results show that Algo-MIMO is able to reduce the superframe length by up to 60% as compared to algorithms that use other IC models, and approximately 40% against algorithms that order nodes based on the number of neighbors, node weight or randomly.