Interference Aware Channel Assignment Scheme in Multichannel Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are gaining significant attention to provide wireless broadband service. Nodes in a wireless mesh network can communicate with each other directly or through one or more intermediate nodes. Because of multi-hop transmissions with multiple contending and competing channels, performance of wireless mesh networks decreases. Supporting high performance is an important challenge in multi-hop mesh networks. Nassiri et al. proposed a Molecular MAC protocol for autonomic assignment and use of multiple channels to improve network performance. In the Molecular MAC protocol, nodes are either nuclei or electrons in an atom. Neighboring atoms use orthogonal channels to operate in parallel data transmissions. Each nucleus selects an idle channel that is not currently being occupied by its neighboring atoms with the assistance from electrons in the same atom. However, this protocol has the following drawback; since a nucleus allocates a channel with help from the electrons in its own transmission range, it is not able to recognize the existence of those atoms in the interference range. Therefore, allocating the same channel to neighboring atoms results in the deterioration of network performance. In order to resolve this problem, we propose a channel allocation scheme with the interference issue taken into account. Based on various simulation results, the proposed scheme was verified that different channels could be allocated to those neighboring atoms in the interference range.