Design and Implementation of a Topology Control Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

The Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) backbone is usually comprised of stationary nodes but the transient nature of wireless links results in changing network topologies. Topology Control (TC) aims to preserve network connectivity in ad hoe and mesh networks and an abundance of theoretical results on the effectiveness of TC exist. Practical evaluations of TC schemes that provide gradual transceiver power adjustments for the WMN backbone are however in their infancy. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of power control in a popular WMN backbone device and design and evaluate an autonomous, light-weight TC scheme called PlainTC. An indoor test-bed evaluation shows that PlainTC is able to maintain network connectivity, achieve significant transceiver power savings and reduce MAC-level contention but that no significant reductions in physical layer interference were realised. The evaluation has also highlighted the danger of associating power savings with network lifetime. Further larger-scale experiments are required to confirm these results.