Nodes organization for channel assignment with topology preservation in multi-radio wireless mesh networks

The wireless mesh network is a new emerging broadband technology providing the last-mile Internet access for mobile users by exploiting the advantage of multiple radios and multiple channels. The throughput improvement of the network relies heavily on the utilizing the orthogonal channels. However, an improper channel assignment scheme may lead to network partition or links failure. In this paper we consider the assignment strategy with topology preservation by organizing the mesh nodes with available channels, and aim at minimizing the co-channel interference in the network. The channel assignment with the topology preservation is proved to be NP-hard and to find the optimized solution in polynomial time is impossible. We have formulated a channel assignment algorithm named as DPSO-CA which is based on the discrete particle swarm optimization and can be used to find the approximate optimized solution. We have shown that our algorithm can be easily extended to the case with uneven traffic load in the network. The impact of radio utilization during the channel assignment process is discussed too. Extensive simulation results have demonstrated that our algorithm has good performance in both dense and sparse networks compared with related works. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.