Routing, spectrum access, and scheduling in multi-hop multi-channel wireless networks with MIMO links

Software-defined radios (SDRs) are a promising technology to enable dynamic channel access and sharing. Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) is another radio technology breakthrough for increasing wireless network capacity. To obtain the full benefits brought by the SDR and MIMO technologies in wireless mesh networks (WMNs), the higher layer mechanisms should exploit their capabilities in a systematic way. In this paper, we investigate routing, channel assignment, link scheduling, and MIMO transmission mode control in multi-channel multi-antenna wireless mesh networks. We first present a cross-layer framework for network performance optimization. Network traffic routing is established on a relatively long time scale to maintain system stability. We then proposed a stream controlled multiple access (SCMA) scheme, which is responsible for assigning frequency channels and scheduling links for data transmission and controlling MIMO transmission modes. It enables efficient spectrum access and sharing in time, frequency, and space, and adapts to varying network conditions. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme greatly improves network performance compared to the traditional schemes.