A Localized Channel Allocation Approach for Realtime Reliable and High Throughput Communication in Multi-channel Networks

Wireless applications have divergent requirements. For example, safety applications require realtime reliable communications via interference-free channels, while entertainment applications require high throughput via channel competition/coordination. The adoption of interference-free channels may result in low channel utilization and the employment of competition/coordination based channels may result in excessive contentions/oevrhead. To solve this conflict, we propose a fully localized channel allocation scheme in a local neighborhood. Specifically, we divide the whole channel set into three categories at each node's neighborhood: primary channels, competitory channels, and secondary channels. In our analysis, we show that the proposed scheme can exclusively provide interference-free channels to each node for realtime reliable communications, while most of the remaining channels can be fully utilized to achieve high throughput based on an adequate but sophisticated channel competition design. Our experiment study demonstrates that our proposed approach is able to support realtime reliable communications via interference-free channel allocation, while at the same time achieve much better channel utilization than the existing mainstream approaches.