Multiple Radio Channel Assignement Utilizing Partially Overlapped Channels

Existing channel assignment algorithms designed for multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks (MRMC-WMN) mainly deal with orthogonal or nonoverlapped channels. But in reality, the limited availability of orthogonal channel is a major issue where the network is very dense in terms of inter-nodal distances. On the other hand, partially overlapped channels (POC) are currently considered as a great potential for increasing the number of simultaneous transmissions and eventually upgrading the network capacity; especially in case of MRMC-WMN. In this paper, we address the limited orthogonal channel problem by exploring the usable POCs. The key technique lies in the fact that the interference between adjacent channels has to be considered intelligently in order to increase the overall capacity. Our contributions include a new interference model I-Matrix that helps selecting channels with less interference and a POC based channel assignment algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our POC based algorithm in terms of capacity by comparing with the one using only orthogonal channels. Our results show capacity improvement as the increased link assignments at an average of more than 15 percent.