Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Protocol for Emergency Wireless Mesh Network

Abstract

In order to solve the limited energy and low throughput problems of the battery-powered wireless mesh network (WMN), an IEEE 802.11n based multi-radio multi-channel energy balancing and high throughput protocol (EBHT) for battery-powered emergency WMN is presented in this paper. EBHT optimizes the route path planning to achieve the energy balance by taking WMN nodes’ residual energy, client accessed condition and route paths’ link quality into account. It also assigns different high quality channels for adjac ent nodes to improve the client communication performance and introduces dual-radio multi-channel allocation algorithm to increase network throughput. The EBHT’s performance is evaluated by designing and implementing an IEEE 802.11n based WMN node. The results show that EBHT can improve WMN’s throughput, enhance the communication reliability and optimize the node energy consumption. Compared with the traditional Mesh protocols, EBHT is more suitable for battery-powered emergency WMN.