Reconfiguring Multi-Rate Wi-Fi Mesh Networks with Flow Disruption Constraints

Abstract

Wi-Fi mesh networks (WMNs) have been considered as a promising data-networking infrastructure in port-logistics environments. In such networks, it has been known that user traffic has a periodic characteristic due to diurnal cycle of human activities. To cope with these dynamics, a WMN has to adaptively reconfigure its settings, such as an activated link, an assigned channel, and a route of a flow. However, a careless reconfiguration of a WMN may lead to a heavy disruption of the on-the-fly traffic, hence resulting in the degradation of a WMN performance. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the -constrained WMN reconfiguration (-WMNR) problem defined as follows: Given the current WMN configuration, the goal of -WMNR is to find a new WMN configuration suitable for the upcoming traffic estimate under a constraint that the number of disrupted flows must be limited to a predefined fixed value . To address this -WMNR problem, we propose a heuristic algorithm, called min–max WMN reconfiguration (MM-WMNR). From the numerical results, we show that our approach outperforms the static WMN configuration algorithms by 25 %.