Maximum bandwidth routing and maximum flow routing in wireless mesh networks

The emergence of nomadic multimedia applications, such as multimedia conferencing, distance learning, video phones, video/movie-on-demand, and education-on-demand, has recently generated much interest in multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to support diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS). In the existing WMN QoS routing protocols, the methods of bandwidth calculation and allocation were proposed to determine routes with bandwidth guaranteed for QoS applications. This paper studies two NP-hard problems, the maximum bandwidth routing problem (abbreviated to MBRP) and the maximum flow routing problem (abbreviated to MFRP). Given a source node s and a destination node d in a multi-hop wireless mesh network, the MBRP is to determine an s -to- d path that can carry a maximum amount of traffic from s to d and the MFRP is to determine the maximum flow from s to d , both retaining the network bandwidth-satisfied. In this paper, heuristic algorithms for the two problems are proposed. Upper bounds on their optimal values are derived, and a lower bound is derived on the feasible value obtained for the MBRP. With the upper bound and the lower bound, an approximation ratio for the heuristic algorithm of the MBRP is obtained. The effectiveness of the heuristic algorithms is further verified by experiments. A generalized interference model is also discussed.