Minimum Interference Channel Assignment Research Articles

Minimum Interference Channel Assignment Algorithm for Multicast in a Wireless Mesh Network.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been considered as one of the key technologies for the configuration of wireless machines since they emerged. In a WMN, wireless routers provide multi-hop wireless connectivity between hosts in the network and also allow them to access the Internet via gateway devices. Wireless routers are typically equipped with multiple radios operating on different channels to increase network throughput. Multicast is a form of communication that delivers data from a source to a set of destinations simultaneously. It is used in a number of applications, such as distributed games, distance education, and video conferencing. In this study, we address a channel assignment problem for multicast in multi-radio multi-channel WMNs. In a multi-radio multi-channel WMN, two nearby nodes will interfere with each other and cause a throughput decrease when they transmit on the same channel. Thus, an important goal for multicast channel assignment is to reduce the interference among networked devices. We have developed a minimum interference channel assignment (MICA) algorithm for multicast that accurately models the interference relationship between pairs of multicast tree nodes using the concept of the interference factor and assigns channels to tree nodes to minimize interference within the multicast tree. Simulation results show that MICA achieves higher throughput and lower end-to-end packet delay compared with an existing channel assignment algorithm named multi-channel multicast (MCM). In addition, MICA achieves much lower throughput variation among the destination nodes than MCM.

Minimum Interference Channel Assignment in Multiradio Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, we consider multihop wireless mesh networks, where each router node is equipped with multiple radio interfaces, and multiple channels are available for communication. We address the problem of assigning channels to communication links in the network with the objective of minimizing the overall network interference. Since the number of radios on any node can be less than the number of available channels, the channel assignment must obey the constraint that the number of different channels assigned to the links incident on any node is at most the number of radio interfaces on that node. The above optimization problem is known to be NP-hard. We design centralized and distributed algorithms for the above channel assignment problem. To evaluate the quality of the solutions obtained by our algorithms, we develop a semidefinite program and a linear program formulation of our optimization problem to obtain lower bounds on overall network interference. Empirical evaluations on randomly generated network graphs show that our algorithms perform close to the above established lower bounds, with the difference diminishing rapidly with increase in number of radios. Also, ns-2 simulations, as well as experimental studies on testbed, demonstrate the performance potential of our channel assignment algorithms in 802.11-based multiradio mesh networks.