Abstract
P. Venkitasubramaniam and L. Tong
"Cross-Layer Energy Allocation in Wireless Mesh Networks"
Submitted to IEEE Journal for Selected Areas in Communications : Special Issue on Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks
, Oct. 2005.
We consider the problem of data acquisition at the mesh routers from wireless clients in a wireless mesh network. Each mesh client in a client network has two transmission strategies: use a multiple access protocol to directly send data to the router, or use multi-hop routing to send the data to a different client with favourable transmission conditions. By employing a location based routing protocol and a simple distributed multiple access, we illustrate the trade-off between routing and direct transmission versus the net traffic load. In particular, we show that the optimal cross-layer strategy undergoes a phase transition. For low traffic, it is optimal to route all the data to overlapping region between mesh routers. Whereas, for high traffic, it is optimal to not route at all.