RESEARCH ARTICLE Providing Throughput Guarantees in Heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper we propose to provide throughput guarantees in heterogeneous wireless mesh networks by jointly optimizing routing and MAC configuration. Our solution is based on the notion of linearized capacity region, which provides a technology-independent way of representing the capacity of a wireless link (thereby hiding the technology specifics to the upper layers). Based on the available capacity of the underlying links as given by the linearized capacity region, we propose two routing algorithms (based on multi-path and single-path, respectively) that find optimal paths for all the flows in the network given their throughput requirements. The throughput allocation resulting from routing is then provided to each link, which uses this information to optimize its technology-specific MAC parameters. The proposed approach is evaluated in an heterogeneous scenario comprising WLAN and WiMAX technologies, and is shown to outperform previous solutions by (at least) a factor of 2. Copyright c © 0000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd