Fairness of Channel Assignment Algorithm Based on Weighted Links Ranking Scheme for Wireless Mesh Network

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are promising means to provide inexpensive deployment, flexible and fast broadband access. Recent WMNs use multiple-radio and multiple channels to provide high performance. However, interference between channels is considered the key challenge for WMN performance. In WMN, the data flows are directed from/to the gateways. Thus, the quality of the critical links close to the gateways should be properly considered during channel assignments. Otherwise, network fragmentation and bottleneck problem may occur which affect the performance of the network due to congestions, and unfair channel distribution. Unfortunately, the existing channel assignments focusing only on the links close to the gateways and neglecting other critical links. This paper proposes a fair channel assignment algorithm based on weighted link ranking scheme in order to minimize the interference and thus improve the capacity of the network. The links are fairly ranked based on multiple criteria obtained from traffic and network topology such as distance from the gateways, interference index, and, traffic load. The results from numerical simulation demonstrate that the proposed channel assignment algorithm has reduced the interference, improving the network capacity, and achieves the fairness of channel distribution.