Joint handoff and resource management for throughput fairness in a wireless mesh network

In this paper we study the problem of providing fair throughput for mobile stations (MSs) in a wireless mesh network (WMN) by jointly considering the handoff management of the MSs and the resource allocations at the access points (APs). An optimization problem is formulated based on long-term proportional fairness, so that all the MSs in the entire WMN can receive fair average throughput, while the total throughput of the MSs is maximized. The optimum solution is based on the assumption of having global information about the channel conditions and mobility information of all the MSs, and cannot be easily implemented in a practical system. A heuristic scheme is then proposed, which allows each AP to allocate its resources based on local information only, and the handoff decisions of the MSs are based on information exchanged between neighboring APs. Numerical results show that performance of the proposed heuristic scheme is very close to the optimum in terms of both fairness and throughput.