Coverage Enhancement for a Multi-channel Ring-based Wireless Mesh Network with Guaranteed Throughput and Delay

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a viable solution to support ubiquitous broadband services with low transmission power. This paper investigates the tradeoffs among delay, throughput, and coverage in a multi-channel ring-based wireless mesh network. In the proposed WMN, a simple ring-based frequency planning is employed to effectively utilize available channels. To evaluate the delay and throughput in the proposed WMN, we develop a physical (PHY)/medium access control (MAC) cross-layer analytical framework, which incorporates the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) MAC protocol and a physical-layer distance-based rate adaptation with multi-hop connections. On top of the analytical model, the mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) optimization approach is applied to analytically determine the optimal number of rings and the associated ring widths, aiming at maximizing the coverage of a mesh cell subject to the requirements of throughput and delay.