Joint Topology Control and Channel Assignment Employing Partially Overlapping Channels in Multirate Wireless Mesh Backbone

Many efforts have been done to better exploit multiple radios and multiple channels to improve system performance in wireless mesh networks. However, in the case of the IEEE 802.11b/g/n family of standards, there are only three non-overlapping channel, the simple use of orthogonal channels cannot effectively eliminate the interference. The simultaneous use of multiple partially overlapping channels has been certified as an effective way to further eliminate interference and improve network performance in 802.11-based wireless mesh networks. Good network topological structure can lead to low interference, load balancing and high throughput. This research looks into the problem of topology control and partially overlapping channel assignment to improve the performance of multi-radio multi-channel multirate wireless mesh networks. We propose an optimal topology control algorithm and greedy channel assignment algorithm to maximize the network capacity (in term of each node’s traffic delivery ratio). Simulation results present that our topology control and partially overlapping channel assignment method can dramatically improve system throughput.