Benefits of inter-flow bandwidth sharing in broadband wireless infrastructure networks

Broadband wireless infrastructure networks are increasingly becoming common in metro areas. To improve spatial bandwidth usage, the nodes in such networks employ directional transmissions over multiple orthogonal channels. In this paper, we study the benefits of sharing channel bandwidth across multiple flows. Every connection is assumed to require a bandwidth that is half of the channel bandwidth. We model the routing and channel assignment problem in two different ways to account for the presence and absence of inter-flow bandwidth sharing. Through simulations, we demonstrate that supporting inter-flow bandwidth sharing through simple time- sharing mechanism results in improved network throughput.