Abstract
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a scalable, reliable, and agile wireless network that supports many types of innovative technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), and Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Due to the limited number of orthogonal channels, interference between channels adversely affects the fair distribution of bandwidth among mesh clients, causing node starvation in terms of insufficient bandwidth distribution, which impedes the adoption of WMN as an efficient access technology. Therefore, a fair channel assignment is crucial for the mesh clients to utilize the available resources. However, the node starvation problem due to unfair channel distribution has been vastly overlooked during channel assignment by the extant research. Instead, existing channel assignment algorithms equally distribute the interference reduction on the links to achieve fairness which neither guarantees a fair distribution of the network bandwidth nor eliminates node starvation. In addition, the metaheuristic-based solutions such as genetic algorithm, which is commonly used for WMN, use randomness in creating initial population and selecting the new generation usually leading the search to local minima. To this end, this study proposes a Fairness-Oriented Semichaotic Genetic Algorithm-Based Channel Assignment Technique (FA-SCGA-CAA) to solve node starvation problem in wireless mesh networks. FA-SCGA-CAA maximizes link fairness while minimizing link interference using a genetic algorithm (GA) with a novel nonlinear fairness-oriented fitness function. The primary chromosome with powerful genes is created based on multicriterion links ranking channel assignment algorithm. Such a chromosome was used with a proposed semichaotic technique to create a strong population that directs the search towards the global minima effectively and efficiently. The proposed semichaotic technique was also used during the mutation and parent selection of the new genes. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm. A comparison with related work shows that the proposed FA-SCGA-CAA reduced the potential node starvation by 22% and improved network capacity utilization by 23%. It can be concluded that the proposed FA-SCGA-CAA is reliable to maintain high node-level fairness while maximizing the utilization of the network resources, which is the ultimate goal of many wireless networks.
Highlights
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) enable flexible, robust connectivity and are a means to various applications, such as healthcare, smart grids, Internet of ings (IoT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and intelligent transportation systems [1, 2]. e ability to use different radio technologies, includingIEEE 802.11 (a/b/g/n) and 802.16, makes WMN flexible enough to support many manufacturing standards for wireless networks [3,4,5,6]
Extensive simulations were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms and techniques (FASCGA-CAA and SCGA-CAA). e results of the proposed algorithm were compared to the multicriterion link rankingbased channel assignment algorithm MCLR-CAA [33] and the interference-aware genetic algorithm-based channel assignment algorithm IA-Genetic Algorithm Based CAA (GA-CAA) that was frequently reported in the literature [37, 39, 41]
Unlike the multicriterion algorithm (MCLR-CAA), the proposed FA-SCGA-CAA algorithm neither biases to specific links based on their criterion nor randomly picks a population that causes the algorithm trapping in local minima
Summary
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) enable flexible, robust connectivity and are a means to various applications, such as healthcare, smart grids, Internet of ings (IoT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and intelligent transportation systems [1, 2]. e ability to use different radio technologies, includingIEEE 802.11 (a/b/g/n) and 802.16, makes WMN flexible enough to support many manufacturing standards for wireless networks [3,4,5,6]. As opposed to Point-to-Point (PTP) communication that is used by traditional ad-hoc networks, WMNs use multipoint to multipoint (MTM) communication to increase network scalability, reliability, and capacity by enabling a mesh node to communicate with more than one other mesh node simultaneously [21]. Such property contributes to achieving reliable, low-maintenance, low-cost, and robust mesh networks. Mesh routers utilize multiple radio interfaces with multiple channels by using multiple radios to decrease the interference between colocated communication links and improve the throughput, connectivity, and capacity of the network. The limited number of orthogonal channels allocated in the wireless standards makes the interference between adjacent links inevitable. erefore, effective channel assignment is key to ensure high network throughput, connectivity, and capacity [3, 7, 28]
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