Optimizing Access Radio in Multi-Radio Mesh Network

This paper discusses a hierarchical multi-radio mesh network, where the normal clients associate with the mesh AP through the access radio and then the mesh APs communicate with each other via the mesh radio. While most of the existing studies focus on the performance issue for the mesh nodes communication with the mesh radio, in this paper, we argue that the channel assignment for the access radio will affect the overall system significantly. In this paper, we try to exploit the information exchange among the mesh nodes to help the access radio channel selection. A new metric, effective channel air time (ECAT), is proposed for channel assignment under this multi-radio mesh network. ECAT can work well when there are traffics in the overlapping channels. A real testbed has been developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metric and scheme.