Channel Assignment with Topology Preservation for Multi-radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Channel assignment is one of the most important issues in the multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks. An improper channel assignment may lead to network partition or link failure. In this paper we focus on the channel assignment problem with the original topology preservation for the multi-radio mesh networks, and aim at minimizing the overall network interference. We have formulated an Integer Line Programming (ILP) which can be used to find the optimized solution for the channel assignment problem in small-size network. In this paper we also have developed a distributed algorithm for the channel assignment due to the NP-hardness of the ILP. Extensive simulation results have demonstrated that our algorithms have good performance in both dense and sparse networks compared with related works. The theoretic and experiment results have shown that the proposed algorithms serve as a practical solution to the channel assignment problem in the multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks.