CORE: centrally optimized routing extensions for efficient bandwidth management and network coding in the IEEE 802.16 MeSH mode

The IEEE 802.16 standard (WiMAX) specifies a MeSH mode which permits the deployment of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) supporting carrier-grade QoS. The network operator for such planned WMNs is interested in maximizing the traffic admitted in the WMN and simultaneously supporting QoS. Recently network coding has emerged as a promising technique for increasing the throughput in WMNs. This paper proposes CORE, which addresses the problem of jointly optimizing the routing, scheduling, and bandwidth savings via network coding. Prior solutions are either not applicable in the 802.16 MeSH mode or computationally too costly to be of practical use in the WMN under realistic scenarios. CORE's heuristics, in contrast, are able to compute solutions for the above problem within a operator definable maximum computational cost, thereby enabling the computation and near real-time deployment of the computed solutions. We analyze the performance of CORE's heuristics via a thorough simulation study covering the typical usage scenarios for WMNs. The results presented demonstrate that CORE is able to increase the number of flows admitted considerably and with minimal computational costs. We also see that CORE successfully increases the number of network coding sessions which can be established in the WMN. Further, the results provide insights into limiting factors for the gains which can be obtained in different typical usage scenarios for WMNs. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (This paper is an extended version of the research presented in our paper originally presented at the IEEE LCN 2008 [1])