Joint channel assignment and link scheduling for wireless mesh networks: Revisiting the Partially Overlapped Channels

Despite all the encouraging reports on the benefit of Partially Overlapped Channels (POCs), the relative simple interference models and rather arbitrary network settings considered in the literature make those reports questionable. In order to gain proper engineering insights, we look into the problem of improving network throughput by making use of POCs in this paper. Our perspectives are novel in that we 1) adopt a more realistic model to capture the additive nature of interference, 2) apply efficient solution techniques to obtain the optimal solutions of the hard optimization problems, and 3) focus on a typical mesh networking scenario. The outcome of our investigations, though revealing interesting aspects of using multiple channels, contradicts the previous statements by exhibiting that only a marginal gain can be obtained if POCs are used.