Multi-Band Multi-Hop WLANs for Disaster Relief and Public Safety Applications

Calamities like tsunami and flood cause communication outage by damaging the communication infrastructure and power supply. As an alternate communication facility, multi-hop relay networks are deployed. Deploying these networks is quick and easy, however, the performance is deteriorated due to the use of relays in such environments. Similarly, given the surge in bandwidth hungry applications, performance parameters such as high throughput and low end-to-end delay are also daunting challenges in the traditional one-hop wireless LANs (WLANs). In this context, simultaneous transmission over multiple bands has the potential to improve the capacity of relay networks and accommodate the future unforeseen bandwidth-hungry applications. Manipulating the attributive diversity of different bands will yield prolific gains in terms of performance. However, for multi-hop transmissions in such multi-band networks, channel conditions and bit-rates over different bands, different links tend to be different. This causes significant degradation in the performance in terms of throughput and end-to-end delay. To address this problem, considering the channel conditions and bitrates of each band on either side of the relay, we exploit Shapley value to distribute the load in such a way that maximizes throughput and minimizes end-to-end delay in multiband networks. Illustrative numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.