Multichannel Assignment Algorithm for Minimizing Imbalanced Channel Utilization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Interference management is extremely important in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Due to the sharing of spectrum, interference resulting from neighboring transmissions may degrade significantly the network performance. Use of multiple non-overlapping channels improves the network capacity or mitigates the interference by allowing multiple transmissions simultaneously on different channels. In this paper, we propose a centralized channel assignment method for single radio-equipped WSNs, which take advantage of multiple channels. The main objective is to minimize the imbalanced channel utilization among nodes in the network. Key components of the channel assignment procedure are root selection, node ordering, and channel selection. We divide the channel set of each node into three categories and assign channel to the node based on channel capacity, load of the node, and load of nodes in 2-hop local neighborhood. The simulation results demonstrate the effect of node ordering and root selection metrics on the network performance, in terms of channel utilization balancing and number of nodes accessing channel ratio.