A user mobility-aware fair channel assignment scheme for wireless mesh network

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (MR-WMNs) are characterized by having multiple radio interfaces with which, node can send/receive data to/from multiple nodes. This feature increases the network capacity and improves data delivery rate. However, interference between the co-located channels is one of the main constraints that hinder such networks from achieving the optimal utilization of the available resources such as bandwidth and transmission routes. Bottleneck is one of the consequences of such limitation, which leads to network fragmentation and performance degradation especially in the critical links shared by multiple paths connecting the nodes with the gateway. Although several studies have been conducted to address such limitation, they were all built on the premise of stationary topology, which does not hold for real world WMNs that include mobile users in addition to backbone nodes and routers. To this end, this paper proposes a user mobility-aware channel assignment algorithm based on weighted link ranking to fairly allocate the channels and minimizes the interference, thus improves the capacity of the network. Multiple criteria were used to rank those links before applying the channel assignment algorithm. Those criteria were obtained from traffic and network topology such as distance from the gateways, interference index, and traffic load. The results from numerical simulation demonstrate that the proposed scheme has reduced the interference which, consequently, improved the network capacity.