Workload-aware opportunistic routing in multi-channel, multi-radio wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic routing emerged as a novel technique to cope with the problem of highly unpredictable and lossy wireless channels in urban wireless mesh networks. However, existing opportunistic routing protocols only consider single-radio wireless nodes, and assume that all the nodes work on the same channel, without exploiting possible concurrent transmissions by multi-radio nodes over orthogonal channels provided by IEEE 802.11 protocols. Examples show that simply integrating existing channel assignment schemes and the opportunistic routing technique may not achieve satisfactory system performance. In this paper, we present WACA, which is a Workload-Aware Channel Assignment algorithm for opportunistic routing in multi-channel, multi-radio wireless mesh networks. Evaluation results show that WACA always achieves highest average throughput among the evaluated algorithms, and its median throughput is at least 16.1% higher than the compared ones.