A Candidate Forwarder Set Based Channel Assignment for Opportunistic Routing in Multi-radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic routing (OR) involves multiple forwarding candidates to relay packets by taking advantage of the broadcast nature and multi-user diversity of the wireless medium. Compared with Traditional Routing (TR), OR can evidently improve the end to end throughput of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). At present, there are many achievements concerning OR in the single radio wireless network. However, the study of OR in multi-radio wireless network stays the beginning stage. In this paper, we focus on OR in multi-radio multi-channel WMNs. Directly using the existing channel assignment leads to decreasing the number of candidate forwarder and the performance of OR. According to OR with one-to-more transmission mode, the Candidate Forwarder Set based Channel Assignment (CFSCA) for OR is proposed. Firstly, according to the candidate forwarder selected by routing, we bound the sender node and its candidate forwarders as a Candidate Forwarder Set(CFS). Then we calculate the interference among all the CFSs. Then the channel assignment for OR is described as a minimum CFS interference optimization problem, which must obey the constraints of the channel number of CFS and the number of radio interfaces. The evaluation results show that CFSCA improves 25.2%, 10%, 19% of the aggregative throughput than random, uniform and tradition channel assignment, respectively.Keywordswireless mesh networksmulti-radio and multi-channelopportunistic routingchannel assignment