Topology Control has been shown to provide several benefits to wireless ad hoc and mesh networks. However these benefits have largely been demonstrated using simulation-based evaluations. In this paper, we demonstrate the negative impact that the PlainTC Topology Control prototype has on topology stability. This instability is found to be caused by the large number of transceiver power adjustments undertaken by the prototype. A context-based solution is offered to reduce the number of transceiver power adjustments undertaken without sacrificing the cumulative transceiver power savings and spatial reuse advantages gained from employing Topology Control in an infrastructure wireless mesh network. We propose the context-based PlainTC+ prototype and show that incorporating context information in the transceiver power adjustment process significantly reduces topology instability. In addition, improvements to network performance arising from the improved topology stability are also observed. Future plans to add real-time context-awareness to PlainTC+ will have the scheme being prototyped in a software-defined wireless mesh network test-bed being planned.
Context-Based Topology Control for Wireless Mesh Networks
