Assessing the Vulnerability of the Fiber Infrastructure to Disasters

This paper considers the interaction between channel assignment and distributed scheduling in multi-channel multiradio Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). Recently, a number of distributed scheduling algorithms for wireless networks have emerged. Due to their distributed operation, these algorithms can achieve only a fraction of the maximum possible throughput. As an alternative to increasing the throughput fraction by designing new algorithms, the authors present a novel approach that takes advantage of the inherent multi-radio capability of WMNs. The authors show that this capability can enable partitioning of the network into subnetworks in which simple distributed scheduling algorithms can achieve 100% throughput. The partitioning is based on the notion of Local Pooling.