Efficient channel assignment and routing protocol for multiple channels multiple interfaces wireless mesh network

Abstract

Wireless technologies, such as 802.11a, provide multiple non-overlapping channels. Effective utilization of the multiple available channels helps to reduce the channel interference so that multiple simultaneous data transmissions can occur and thus increasing network capacity. Initial approach for exploiting multiple available channels is dedicating one interface for each channel. However, this approach incurs high hardware cost and is not practical. This paper presents a distributed channel assignment and routing protocol that can take advantage of multiple available channels with two interfaces by dynamically switching the channels for forwarding packets based on data traffic. Our model can work with any existing routing protocol, we extend the AODV routing protocol with suitable modification and an additional routing metric to present the proposed AODV-M algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms exploit the available channels to significantly increase the network capacity while reducing the end-to-end delay time.