Interplay between Power Control and Channel Allocation for Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

In wireless networks, interference from adjacent nodes that are concurrently transmitting can cause packet reception failures and thus a significant throughput degradation. The interference can be simply avoided by assigning different orthogonal channels to each interfering node. However, if the number of orthogonal channels is smaller than that of interfering nodes, some adjacent nodes have to share the same channel and may interfere with each other. This interference can be mitigated by reducing the transmit power of the interfering nodes. In this paper, we propose to jointly coordinate the transmit power and the multi-channel allocation to maximize the network throughput performance by fully exploiting multi-channel availability. This coordination enables each node to use high transmission power as long as different orthogonal channels can be assigned to its adjacent nodes. Then, we propose a simple multi-channel media access control (MAC) protocol that allows the nodes on different channels to perform efficient data exchanges without interference in multi-channel networks. We show that the proposed scheme improves the network throughput performance in comparison with other existing schemes.