A Clustering-Based Channel Assignment Algorithm and Routing Metric for Multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks.

Multiple non-overlapped channels are available in IEEE 802.11 but are rarely used today in wireless multi-hop networks. Wireless mesh network is a special type of multi-hop ad hoc network and is envisioned to provide high capacity and large coverage. In this paper, we propose a 2-hop clustering based multi-interface, multi-channel network architecture and design a novel channel assignment algorithm and routing metric. Channel assignment is composed of Inter-cluster Static Assignment and Intra-cluster Dynamic Assignment. Since traditional routing metrics, such as hop-count, may not perform well in multi-channel wireless networks, we propose the CDM routing metric, which combines hop-count, channel diversity and channel switching capability together. Simulation results show that our algorithms achieve up to 3.3 times higher end-to-end throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]