A Load Aware Channel Assignment and Link Scheduling Algorithm for Multi-channel Multi-radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks with multiple channels and multipleradios on the mesh routers, have a great potential to increase theoverall capacity of the network. To obtain the complete benefit of theincreased capacity of such networks, efficient Channel Assignment (CA)and Link Scheduling (LS) algorithms are extremely important. A staticCA and LS may not be optimal, in terms of utilization of underlyingnetwork resources, for every traffic demand in the network. In this paper,we find the optimal CA and LS for the given traffic demand byformulating an MILP by considering the traffic demand for each source-destination pairs, with the objective of maximizing the total achievedthroughput of the network. We also propose a simple, but effective Loadaware Channel Assignment and Link Scheduling (LoCALS), a polynomiallybound heuristic algorithm for CA and LS. We show that LoCALSperforms on par with the optimal solution. Finally, we compare LoCALSwith a distributed channel assignment algorithm which is unaware of thetraffic demand, in order to demonstrate the importance of consideringthe traffic demand for CA and LS.