Improving Capacity and Flexibility of Wireless Mesh Networks by Interface Switching

The capacity and flexibility of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) can be greatly improved by adopting dynamic channel assignment. However, dynamic channel assignment brings new challenges such as switching overheads and dependency problems. We propose a channel assignment protocol, called the hybrid channel assignment protocol (HCAP) for infrastructure WMNs (I-WMN). To find out a reasonable tradeoff between flexibility and switching overheads, HCAP adopts static interface assignment strategy for nodes that have the heaviest loads. For other nodes, it adopts a hybrid strategy. HCAP uses a slot-based coordination policy to implement communications between nodes that adopt hybrid strategy. NS2-based simulations show that HCAP not only improves capacity and scalability of I-WMNs, but also enhances per-flow fairness.