Neighborhood Nodes Collaboration to support QoS routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

One of the most promising wireless technologies is Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). The aggregate capacity of wireless mesh networks can be improved significantly by providing each node with several Wireless Network Interface Cards (WNICs) and by using multiple channels in order to minimize the interference and to provide high performance in such networks. However, multiple WNICs in each node requires a channel assignment planning. The channels have to be assigned in such a way that interference is decreases and performance is increases at the same time. Since the number of available channels is limited, it is desired to allocate and reallocate channels dynamically on demand. In this paper, a dynamic channel assignment is proposed for the aforementioned problem which is adaptive to the load in wireless mesh networks and supports QoS routing. The algorithm adds or selects a channel for heavily loaded nodes, based on the local information of the neighbor nodes. The selected or added channel minimizes the interference and ensures the network connectivity.