A Tree based Channel Assignment Protocol for Considering the Performance Anomaly in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks

WMN is one of efficient solutions to provide Internet services for users by forming wireless backbone networks with wireless links. The dominant technology for WMNs is the IEEE 802.11, which provides multi-channel and multi-rate capabilities. One of important issues in WMNs is the network capacity and it is essential to design a multi-channel protocol that leverages the network capacity. However, when wireless links that use different data rates operate on the common channel, the performance of high-rate links is severely degraded by the presence of the low-rate links, which is often referred as performance anomaly. In this paper, we propose a Tree-based Channel Assignment (TreeCA) protocol to mitigate the performance anomaly problem by distributing data rates over multiple channels. TreeCA performs channel assignments based on the tree WMN architecture to accommodate the Internet traffics efficiently. Parent nodes on the tree distribute their child nodes over multiple channels so that the performance anomaly is reduced. Through simulations, we observed that the proposed TreeCA outperforms the existing multi-channel protocols for WMNs.