Local Channel Information Assisted Channel Assignment for Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) has recently evolved into a hot issue to support high network capacity in wireless access networks. Although IEEE 802.11 PHY and MAC specification support up to 3 and 12 multiple non-overlapping channels according to IEEE 802.11b/g and IEEE 802.11a, respectively, it is a critical issue to exploit all channels to accommodate a large volume of network traffics in WMN. In this paper, we proposed a channel assignment scheme using the local channel information for multi-channel WMNs. In the proposed scheme, nodes perform only channel switching without channel scanning during data communication with neighbors operating on different channels. Our simulation study results show that the proposed scheme achieves improved throughput performance over existing schemes.