Interference-Aware Multi-source Transmission

In a multi-hop wireless network, a node can act as a candidate file provider to other nodes, if it has downloaded the file from the Internet. When another node requires the same file, all nodes which have already obtained the file can act as candidate file providers (sources) and transmit file together to the request node (destination). We form this as the multi-source transmission. As the multi-source transmissions can exploit multiple paths to transmit data, it is an efficient way to largely increase the download throughput. Although it is promising, suffering from wireless interference, all candidate file providers transmitting together in a multi-source transmission may not provide better performance or even worse performance than only a subset of candidate file providers involved. Moreover, to maximize the performance gain, multi-radio and multichannel technique is exploited to alleviate interference, where the source, multi-path routing, and channel are closely related and should be joint solved. The multi-source transmission problem becomes very challenging. This paper is the first study to investigate the multi-source transmission problem in multi-hop wireless network and proposes an interference-aware joint source, routing, and channel selection scheme to solve the problem. Firstly, we propose a novel interference-aware metric (Metric of Path Capacity, MIPC) to capture interference. Based on the metric, we propose three sub-algorithms: interferenceaware routing algorithm, channel selection algorithm, and local routing adjustment algorithm to solve the multi-source transmissions problem. We have done extensive simulations. The simulation results make clear that the proposed scheme can effectively maximize the network throughput.