A ROUTING POLICY FOR MULTI-INTERFACE MULTI-CHANNEL WIRELESS MESH NETWORK COMBINED WITH CHANNEL ASSIGNMENT AND ITS APPLICATION IN COAL MINE

The performance of wireless mesh networks will effectively improve when the network nodes are equipped with multiple interfaces and these interfaces are allocated with multiple channels. But this requires an appropriate channel assignment and routing protocol. Based on the analysis of current channel allocation and routing strategies for multi-interface multi-channel wireless mesh networks, a routing policy combined with channel allocation named MIMC-AODV is designed in this paper. During the route found period, a strategy same as AODV which is an on-demand routing protocol of Ad Hoc networks is used to find the shortest path. During the route replying period, interfaces of nodes in found path will be assigned with appropriate, channels one by one while these nodes receiving Route Reply in turn. So the channel resources are full used as much as possible to avoid link interference. Simulation results showed that the path selected will remain high throughput and low-end delay. As a typical apply example, the long chain topology backhaul network with multiple hops in coal mine will provide better wireless multimedia broadband services when MIMC-AODV is adopted.