ALGORITHMS FOR ROUTING AND CHANNEL ASSIGNMENT IN WIRELESS INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS

Abstract

Wireless communication is a rapidly growing segment of the communication industry, with the potential to provide low-cost, high-quality, and high-speed information exchange between portable devices. To harvest the available bandwidth efficientlyin a wireless network, they employ multiple orthogonal channels over multiple ra-dios at the nodes. In addition, nodes in these networks employ directional antennasas radios to improve spatial throughput. This dissertation develops algorithms forrouting and broadcasting with channel assignment in such networks. First, we com-pute the minimum cost path between a given source-destination pair with channelassignment on each link in the path such that no two transmissions interfere witheach other. Such a path must satisfy the constraint that no two consecutive links onthe path are assigned the same channel, referred to as "channel discontinuity con-straint." To compute such a path, we develop two graph expansion techniques basedon minimum cost perfect matching and dijkstra's algorithm. Through extensive sim-ulations, we study the effectiveness of the routing algorithms developed based onthe two expansion techniques and the benefits of employing the minimum cost per-fect matching based solution. Secondly, we study the benefits of sharing channelbandwidth across multiple flows. We model the routing and channel assignmentproblem in two different ways to account for the presence and absence of inter-flowbandwidth sharing. Benefits of multiple paths between a source-destination pairmotivates the problem of computing multiple paths between a source-destinationpair with channel assignment such that all the paths can be active simultaneouslyto achieve maximal flow between the pair in the considered network. Since finding even two such paths is NP-hard, we formulate the problem as an integer linearprogram and develop efficient heuristic to find these paths iteratively. Thirdly, wecompute a broadcast tree from a given root with channel assignment such that all the links in the broadcast tree can be active simultaneously without interferingwith each other. Since finding such a tree is an NP-hard problem, we formulatethe problem as an integer linear program (ILP) and develop heuristics to find thebroadcast tree with channel assignment. We evaluate and compare the performanceof the developed heuristics with respect to their success rate, average depth of theobtained tree, and average path length from root to a node in the network. Thisdissertation also analyzes the blocking performance of a channel assignment schemein a multi-channel wireless line network. We assume that the existing calls in thenetwork may be rearranged on different channels to accommodate an incoming call.The analysis is limited to single-hop calls with different transmission ranges.Finally, this dissertation evaluates the performance of disjoint multipath routingapproaches for all-to-all routing in packet-switched networks with respect to packetoverhead, path lengths, and routing table size. We develop a novel approach basedon cycle-embedding to obtain two node-disjoint paths between all source-destinationpairs with reduced number of routing table entries maintained at a node (hence thereduced look up time), small average path lengths, and less packet overhead. Westudy the trade-off between the number of routing table entries maintained at anode and the average length of the two disjoint paths by: (a) formulating the cycle-embedding problem as an integer linear program; and (b) developing a heuristic.We show that the number of routing table entries at a node may be reduced toat most two per destination using cycle-embedding approach, if the length of thedisjoint paths are allowed to exceed the minimum by 25%.