Topology simplification and channel assignment in multi-radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

As the price of hardware decreases, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) will become practical commodity in a few years. By equipping each node with multiple network interface cards, multiple channels can be applied to improve the performance of WMNs. With the advantages of both wireless LAN and Ad Hoc, WMN also has challenges. Connectivity of the communication network and the interferences between the links of the network are two most important points to be considered carefully. This paper presents some efficient technologies to handle the two points. It firstly simplifies the topology of the communication network and gets a bi-connected network; then for the resulted network, it greedily assigns channels such that the interference of the network is as small as possible. The simulation results show that, by applying the technologies presented in this paper, a bi-connected network with minimum interference is created.