Joint Rate Control and Resource Allocation in OFDMA Wireless Mesh Networks

The authors develop distributed algorithms for joint end-to-end rate control and resource (e.g., subcarrier, power) allocation in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)-based wireless mesh networks. These algorithms allow spatial reuse where the same subcarrier can be used for simultaneous transmissions on different links as long as they weakly interfere with each other. The subcarrier allocation algorithm is based on routing information and a novel definition of interference sets and it aims at providing fair transmission rate among traffic flows in an end-to-end basis. The joint rate and power control is treated as a network utility maximization problem considering interference of simultaneous transmissions on the same subcarrier with node power constraint. The numerical results confirm the convergence of the joint rate and power control algorithm and show that fair end-to-end transmission is achieved. With the distributed radio resource management framework developed in this paper, a proper spatial reuse can be done to achieve good system throughput performance.