Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Assignment Algorithm in Maritime Wireless Mesh Networks

The recent growth in the maritime industry stemming to increase in global commerce as well as searching for hydrocarbons at offshore locations, the high data rate and cost affordable maritime communication is acquired. A mesh network is envisaged for maritime communications because of its expanded coverage, self-healing, and high-capacity. With the development of multi-radio technology, the frequency interference can be decreased sharply with proper channel assignment. The static channel assignment optimization is often applied to decrease the wireless frequency interference which is known as an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we focus on the static channel assignment issue and propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the optimization problem. The problem is addressed by assigning channels to communication links to minimize the interference from overall network. A modified particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed to optimize the problem, and a new merging solution is adopted to reassign channels for nodes, which violate the radio constraints. Multi-radio simulation is performed in NS-3 to validate the effectiveness of the proposed channel assignment algorithm. The results show that the algorithm is able to find an optimized assignment with fewer iterations than the previous work and improve network performance.