An Energy Efficient Distributed Scheduling Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

The usefulness of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) highly depends on the effective usage of frequency spectrum, scalability and energy efficiency of the underlying technologies [1]. While maximizing network throughput for given frequency spectrum, and scalability have been extensively studied in multi-hop environments, energy efficiency has not received due attention. In this paper, we propose an enhanced pseudo random access (EPRA) scheme based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 distributed mesh framework to improve energy efficiency. Our proposal addresses issues that we identify with the existing election based transmission timing (EBTT) mechanism of IEEE 802.16-2004. Our extensive simulation results show a very significant improvement in the reception energy efficiency by up to 85%. Moreover, notable improvements are also obtained in the transmission energy efficiency. While we focus mainly on the aspect of energy efficiency, the proposed enhancement also helps to improve the spatial reuse of the frequency spectrum.