Cognitive WMNs: A distributed mechanism for leasing cellular bandwidth

We study flow optimization in cognitive Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) that lease bandwidth from a collocated cellular network (CN). We develop a distributed mechanism that such WMNs can use to optimize their traffic given their own utilities and costs and the costs that the CN is charging for the use of its channels. We evaluate the mechanism in a synthetic scenario using the topology of a deployed WMN and time-varying traffic requirements induced from real-life vehicle mobility traces. Simulations show that the mechanism can track well the changes in the problem parameters, continuously keeping close to the optimum operation point.