Joint Resource Allocation and Routing for OFDMA-Based Broadband Wireless Mesh Backhaul Networks

In this paper, we formulate and solve a joint resource allocation and routing problem for a wireless mesh backhaul network consisting of fixed base station routers interconnected through Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based wireless links. Some of the mesh routers are assumed to function as gateways with high bandwidth connections to a wired network and the mesh network is assumed to provide multi-hop capability where the traffic entering the wireless mesh via gateways may be carrid over multiple wireless hops towards the destination mesh routers. The main objective of this work is to optimize resource allocation and routing in such networks; in this regard, we formulate and solve a cross-layer optimization problem that includes power control, OFDMA resource allocation (i.e., tones), link scheduling and routing. We provide results highlighting the capacity benefits of our proposed approach; these results indicate that the proposed cross-layer optimized OFDMA mesh provides an efficient backhaul solution for cellular networks.