Transmission scheduling for wireless mesh network systems equipped with multiple directional antennas

All existing broadcast scheduling algorithms (BSAs) were designed for omnidirectional antenna (OA) packet radio (PR) nodes of a wireless mesh network (WMN). However, when WMN nodes are equipped with multiple directional antennas (DAs), a signal sent from a neighboring node may be received by more than one DA of the receiving node, and some nodes may receive signals from multiple DAs sent from the same node. When existing OA BSAs are used for scheduling transmission time-slots in time division multiple access (TDMA), due to the multiple DA signal detection phenomenon a weak performance in average time delay and channel utilization is obtained. Therefore, a novel transmission scheduling algorithm (TSA) for WMN nodes equipped with multiple DAs is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that a significant performance gain can be obtained from using the proposed DA-TSA scheme. (C) 2011 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.