Mini-slot scheduling for IEEE 802.16d chain and grid mesh networks

This work considers the mini-slot scheduling problem in IEEE 802.16d wireless mesh networks (WMNs). An efficient mini-slot scheduling needs to take into account the transmission overhead, the scheduling complexity, and the signaling overhead to broadcast the scheduling results. We are interested in chain and grid WMNs, which are the basic topologies of many applications. We propose scheduling schemes that are featured by low complexity and low signaling overhead. Compared to existing works, this work contributes in developing low-cost schemes to find periodical and regular schedules that achieve near-optimal transmission latencies by balancing between transmission overhead and pipeline efficiency and that are more practical and easier to implement. To minimize the transmission latency, we model the transmission latency as a function of the transmission size and the subscriber stations' traffic demands, and take the first-order derivative of the transmission size to find the minimum latency. Simulation results show that our schemes significantly improve over existing works in computational complexity while maintain similar or better transmission latencies.