An efficient scheduling scheme for MIMO wireless mesh networks with fairness constraints

Multi hop wireless mesh networks presents a promising solution to extent the coverage and increase the number of clients sharing the same broadband connection. Introducing the MIMO technology at the physical layer of those networks allows to improve the performance and support a higher number of clients. However, in such systems the absence of an efficient and fair medium access strategy can lead to severe unfairness between the clients and to poor system performances. In this paper, we propose a fair scheduling algorithm that improves considerably the bandwidth utilization while the fairness is guaranteed. We evaluate our proposed algorithm by simulation in order to show the maximum throughput that can be obtained while the different nodes of the MIMO-based wireless mesh networks are served fairly.