Distributed channel assignment combined with routing over multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

In order to realize the reduction of equipment cost and the demand of higher capacity, wireless mesh network (WMN) router devices usually have several interfaces and work on multi-channels. Jointing channel allocation, interface assignment and routing can efficiently improve the network capacity. This paper presents an efficient channel assignment scheme combined with the multi-radio link quality source routing (MR-LQSR) protocol, which is called channel assignment with MR-LQSR (CA-LQSR). In this scheme, a physical interference model is established: calculated transmission time (CTT) is proposed as the metric of channel assignment, which can reflect the real network environment and channel interference best, and enhanced weighted cumulative expected transmission time (EWCETT) is proposed as the routing metric, which preserves load balancing and bandwidth of links. Meantime, the expression of EWCETT contains the value of CTT, thus the total cost time of channel assignment and routing can be reduced. Simulation results show that our method has advantage of higher throughput, lower end-to-end time delay, and less network cost over some other existing methods. © 2012 The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications.