Comparative Methods of Channel Assignment in Multivariate Wireless Networks

Wireless mesh network is a network implemented over a wireless local area network (LAN), and its infrastructure type is decentralized, relatively inexpensive, reliable, and resilient since the wireless routers are often static and not powered by batteries. In addition, the access points (routers) seldom change their positions in wireless mesh networks, and some wireless nodes have gateway functions to provide the connectivity to the Internet. Therefore, such networks behave almost like wired networks with infrequent topology changes and limited node failures. Due to these good properties and potential applications such as providing commercial Internet access to residents and local businesses, wireless mesh networks have drawn a lot of attention in recent years. For example, wireless mesh networks are being used as the last mile for extending the Internet connectivity for mobile nodes. In addition, some commercial deployments of multihop wireless meshes are already in the works. For instance, a number of mesh networks have been deployed in some cities of the United States, including Medford, Oregon, and cities in Minnesota [4]. Unlike traditional wired network, close-by mesh routers share certain wireless channels and the capacity of wireless mesh network will be increased tremendously when extending from a single channel model to a multiradio, multichannel, multihop model. For example, if two nodes vi and v j could communicate with each other by channel f1, and both nodes have at least one more available network interface cards, which could operate on another channel f2, if f2 is also available for both nodes, vi and v j could use both f1 and f2 to communicate simultaneously. When such cases are applied to more wireless nodes, the throughput of a wireless network will be increased tremendously.