From LINC
Overview
Mesh networks will play a key role in future-generation wireless systems, as evidenced by the recent work on the IEEE 802.11s and IEEE 802.16j standards. The key aspect of mesh networks is their ability to support multihop signaling, where intermediate nodes can forward a message from a source to a distantly located destination.
Our Contributions
We have proposed the use of a decentralized contention-based protocol for single-relay selection in mesh networks. This relay selection protocol relies on the use of "Hello" message feedback from decoding relays to the source during a set of feedback minislots. We have shown that our decentralized protocol yields gains over a point-to-point strategy that ignores the relays. In addition, our protocol yields throughputs that are comparable to those yielded by a centralized relay selection strategy that relies on GPS information.
We have also proposed centralized relay selection strategies for two-hop networks where transmission is based on a layered coding framework. Our objective is to maximize throughput by selecting a subset of the potential relays subject to a power constraint on the selected nodes. This is a difficult problem, so we approximate it by selecting the relays that are close to a particular location. This location-based approximation gives rise to two relay selection algorithms that yield throughputs close to those yielded by the optimal selection strategy.
The following LiNC members are involved in this research area: