Channel Assignment in Multi-interface Multi-channel Wireless Networks

Abstract

Channel assignment plays an important role in the performance of multi-channel multi radio wireless networks. Throughput and network connectivity being the very important performance metrics are severely degraded by the interference in these networks. Due to the dynamic and time varying nature of these networks, predicting channel quality and deciding the best channel becomes challenging. Channel quality is the function of interference caused by the transmissions in the neighbourhood nodes communicating on same channel, while connectivity depends on the number of channel and node density. Single channel provides ideal connectivity (network is fully connected), but on the other hand, it limits the overall throughput of the network. This results in connectivity-throughput trade-o . In this thesis, we propose a channel assignment algorithm that is meant to maximize connectivity and throughput at a certain level. In the proposed approach, channel assignments to the interfaces on each node depend upon the quality of a channel. Our algorithm is distributed in nature and becomes stable after few iterations of channel assignment. Our contributions in this work are to ensure connectivity and to maximize network throughput. Simulation results from ns-2 and empirical modeling show that our approach achieves better results compared to other approaches like common channel assignment (CCA) and optimization based approaches.