Novel centralized and distributed link schedulers for multi-transmit-receive wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are an ffective and attractive solution for broad- band access in metropolitan as well as rural areas. They are used to deliver video, voice and data in indoor and outdoor environments. In WMNs, nodes are connected to one another wirelessly and they forward packets via multi-hop communications to each other or to gateways. WMNs technology has matured signifcantly over the past few years. A key advance in enabling higher capacity is to provide mesh routers with multiple transmit/receive capability to create so called Multi-Transmit-Receive (MTR) WMNs. This can be realized by equipping nodes with multiple directional antennas or using Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technologies. In partic- ular, MTR WMNs enable nodes to transmit simultaneously to, or receive simulta- neously from more than one neighboring node over the same frequency, and thereby yielding a WMN that has higher network capacity than conventional WMNs.