On estimating path capacity in wireless mesh networks

Accurate capacity measures for a path in wireless mesh network can be useful to many applications, including routing protocol design, QoS guarantees, congestion control and other related areas. In this paper, we propose the local virtual probing analytical model. A linear programming problem of both channel assignment and packet scheduling is formulated to determine the capacity of any given path, and hence we propose a path capacity evaluating algorithm based on greedy strategy (PCEAGS) to solve it. Finally, we discuss the impact of several factors, such as hop count of path, amount of packets and numbers of available channels and radios per node, on the accuracy of PCEAGS in detail. The result shows that our algorithm can estimate path capacity accurately in lower average time complexity and also has better expansibility. ? Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.EI