GDCA: A Distributed Channel Assignment Mechanism for Multi-radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Channel assignment is one of the most important problem in the research of the multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks ((MRMC-WMN). Aiming at minimizing the overall network interference and optimizing the usage of channel resource, channel assignment problem must obey the constraint of limited radios and available channels for MRMC-WMN. The above optimization problem is known to be NP-complete. This paper focuses on the study of channel assignment in MRMC-WMN. We propose a new grid-loop-based mechanism for dynamic channel assignment. Our mechanism exploits the group which we called grid-loop, which is constructed on distributed minimum spanning tree by self-organized. Our new GDCA scheme has many advantages over cluster-based scheme. The analysis and comparison demonstrates its feasibility, stability, cost-saving and efficiency.