Bandwidth Balancing in Multi-Channel IEEE 802.16 Wireless Mesh Networks.

Bandwidth Balancing in Multi-Channel IEEE 802.16 Wireless Mesh Networks Claudio Cicconetti, Ian Akyildiz, Luciano Lenzini to appear in Proc. of INFOCOM'07, Anchorage, AK, May 2007.

This paper presents a way to improve on the fairness of 802.16 distributed scheduler for mesh networks. It is interesting for me, since the standard for 802.16 distributed scheduling came from the work of a group that was located in the same office as I am, the rooftop wireless router.

Anyhow, the paper is pretty well made and presents the key idea nicely. It is to my knowledge the first paper considering fairness in the mesh 802.16 standard. The answer to the fairness issue exhibited by 802.16 is pretty straightforward, but you had to identify the problem in the first place.

The solution is distributed as well, of course, and maintains limited state: a few buffers per neighbors. There is no complicated optimization, just a simple weighing mechanism to split the bandwidth fairly among the active flows. Nice performance evaluation using an NS-2 implementation of the 802.16 distributed mesh function that I'd like to get my hands on.