A dynamic channel assignment technique for wireless Internet-access mesh networks

The wireless Internet-access mesh network (WIMNET) has been studied to provide a flexible, inexpensive large-scale access network to the Internet. WIMNET is composed of multiple access points (APs) as wireless routers that are communicated with each others through multihop wireless links mainly by the wireless distribution system (WDS). In WIMNET, hosts may move in the field, which can raise issues such as the quality of service, the channel interference, and the network load management. As a result, the adaptive channel assignment to the wireless links between APs to host distributions, becomes essential to improve the performance of WIMNET. In this paper, we formulate this dynamic channel assignment (DCA) problem for WIMNET, and present a DCA technique through modifications of our existing study with the newly defined decision function for the channel reassignment. The effectiveness of our approach is verified through extensive simulations using the WIMNET simulator.