A practical approach for channel assignment in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks

Automatic channel assignment is a key technique to mitigate signal interference and to increase network capacity in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks. Existing algorithms either can not make efficient use of available radio frequency resources, or have channel assignment coupled with routing and thus lack the practicality in the real world. In this paper, we describe the design of a traffic-aware routing-independent channel assignment algorithm, which aims to make a better trade-off between mesh network capacity improvement and the practicality for channel assignment. Our algorithm does not need any explicit knowledge from the routing protocols. It assumes long-term stable traffic demand and measures the traffic load on each network link. It then assigns channels to the radios based on the measured traffic demand on the network. Extensive ns2 simulations demonstrate that, compared to [8], decoupling channel assignment from routing in our algorithm does not result in significant performance degradation.