Demand Based State Aware Channel Reconfiguration Algorithm for Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Efficient utilization of Multi Channel - Multi Radio (MC-MR) Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) can be achieved only by intelligent Channel Assignment (CA) and Link Scheduling (LS). Due to the dynamic nature of traffic demand in WMNs, the CA has to be reconfigured whenever traffic demand changes, in order to achieve maximum throughput in the network. The reconfiguration of CA requires channel switching which leads to disruption of ongoing traffic in the network. The existing CA algorithms for MC-MR WMNs in the literature do not consider the channel reconfiguration overhead that occurs due to this channel switching. In this paper, we propose a novel reconfiguration framework that considers both network throughput and reconfiguration overhead to quantitatively evaluate a reconfiguration algorithm. Based on the reconfiguration framework, we propose an online heuristic algorithm for CA called Demand based State Aware channel Reconfiguration Algorithm (DeSARA) that finds the CA for the current traffic demand by considering the existing CA of the network to minimize the reconfiguration overhead. We show through simulations that DeSARA outperforms both static CA and fully dynamic CA in terms of total achieved throughput.