Cross-layer optimization for resource allocation in multihop wireless networks

Multihop wireless networks have very limited resources such as bandwidth and power. Designing efficient rate control, routing, scheduling, power control and channel assignment schemes to allocate scarce resources for network users, is the topic of this dissertation. The design goals are to improve network throughput and fairness, provide Quality of Service (QoS), support survivability, and achieve power efficiency.; In the first part of this dissertation, QoS routing is studied for TDMA-based multihop wireless networks. Interference-aware routing and scheduling algorithms are presented to compute interference-optimal cost-bounded paths and allocate bandwidth along the found paths. The second part focuses on cross-layer optimization in emerging multi-radio Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). A set of novel interference-aware cross-layer schemes, including interference-aware channel assignment and QoS routing algorithms, maximum throughput and fair bandwidth allocation schemes and joint rate control, routing and scheduling schemes, are proposed to efficiently allocate network resources. For a given channel assignment, the proposed routing algorithms and bandwidth allocation schemes can find corresponding optimal solutions. In the third part, a well-known cross-layer design problem, the joint scheduling and power control problem is addressed for TDMA-based multihop wireless networks. The optimization objective is to improve network throughput. Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulations and an effective heuristic algorithm are presented to provide maximum throughput and fair solutions.; The numerical results show that the proposed QoS routing, and joint scheduling and power control schemes substantially outperform existing schemes, and provide performance comparable with that of the optimal solutions. Moreover, the proposed fair bandwidth and rate allocation schemes achieve a good tradeoff between throughput and fairness.