Channel Assignment Exploiting Partially Overlapping Channels for Wireless Mesh Networks

Unlike most IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks, in which only a single channel is used, wireless mesh networks allow the simultaneous use of multiple channels to increase the aggregated capacity. Many efforts have been taken to better exploit multiple non-overlapped channels. Although the IEEE 802.11 b/g standards, which govern the unlicensed 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band, provide 11 channels, only three of them, namely 1, 6 and 11 are nonoverlapped. In this paper, we propose a new channel assignment scheme named channel assignment exploiting partially overlapping channels (CAEPO). CAEPO can not only assign non-overlapped channels, but also exploit partially overlapping channels. In the proposed scheme, the traffic-aware interference between channels is considered to be the main factor, which is turned into a metric according to the overlapping degree between channels. In addition to that, packet loss ratio is another major consideration in the development of our proposed channel assignment scheme. From simulation results, we can see that using 11 channels, CAEPO effectively improves the network performance.