Centralized Quasi-Static Channel Assignment for Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Employing multiple channels in wireless multihop networks is regarded as an effective approach to increasing network capacity. This paper presents a centralized quasi-static channel assignment for multi-radio multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). The proposed channel assignment can efficiently utilize multiple channels with only 2 radios equipped on each mesh router. In the scheme, the network end-to-end traffics are first modeled by probing data at wireless access points, and then the traffic load between each pair of neighboring routers is further estimated using an interference-aware estimation algorithm. Having knowledge of the expected link load, the scheme assigns channels to each radio with the objective of minimizing network interference, which as a result greatly improves network capacity. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is highly responsive to varying traffic conditions, and the network performance under the channel assignment significantly outperforms the single-radio IEEE 802.11 network as well as the 2-radio WMN with static 2 channels.