Pareto optimal resource management for wireless mesh networks with QoS assurance: Joint node clustering and subcarrier allocation

Node clustering and subcarrier allocation are imperative to ameliorate system throughput and facilitate quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning by means of effective interference control and maximum frequency reuse. In this paper, we propose a novel node clustering algorithm with effective tax-based subcarrier allocation tailored for wireless mesh networks with QoS support. With increased frequency reuse, our proposed approach is shown to achieve a higher system throughput than a conflict-graph approach and a baseline approach. Also, our approach is demonstrated promising in balancing packet delay and end-to-end transmission rate. By carefully adjusting an upper bound of subcarriers allocated to each cluster, we can achieve improved system performance. The proposed resource allocation achieves the Pareto optimality, demonstrating efficient use of network resources. Further, our analysis reveals that how to allocate resources in a wireless network in a decentralized manner can affect the solution space of a performance tradeoff between QoS provisioning and throughput maximization.