A load-balanced channel assignment scheme for wireless mesh networks

Wireless networking technologies have recently progressed at a rapid rate. One important area is wireless mesh networking. As multi-radio, multi-channel technologies become more mature, they also create new research challenges. This paper proposes two heuristics for load balanced channel assignment aiming to minimize the bandwidth usage variance among all the wireless channels. They utilize measurements of channel usage, while taking into consideration link quality in terms of packet loss. Their time, space, and message complexities have been shown analytically to be modest. Performance evaluation by simulation further demonstrates that, comparing with a base-line scheme, the proposed channel assignment schemes are effective in achieving high network delivery ratio as well as low packet delay in a multi-radio, multi-channel wireless mesh network.