Using Partially Overlapping Channels to Improve Throughput in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks have attracted great interest in the research community recently. Much effort has been devoted to maximizing the network performance using limited channel resources in a multichannel multiradio wireless mesh network. It is believed that the limited spectrum resource can be fully exploited by utilizing partially overlapping channels in addition to nonoverlapping channels in 802.11b/g networks. However, there are only few studies of channel assignment algorithms for partially overlapping channels. In this paper, we first formulate the optimal channel assignment problem with the goal of maximizing the overall network throughput or maximizing the throughput of a multicast application. For both cases, we present a greedy algorithm for partially overlapping channel assignment, and then propose a novel genetic algorithm, which has the potential to obtain better solutions. Through evaluation, we demonstrate that the overall network throughput can be dramatically improved by properly utilizing the partially overlapping channels. The genetic algorithm outperforms the greedy algorithm in mitigating the network interference, and therefore leads to higher network throughput. In addition, the multicast throughput can also be dramatically improved by using our algorithms compared to previous work.