A Radio Interference Aware Dynamic Channel Utilization Method on Software Defined WMN

Abstract

This paper proposes a dynamic channel utilization method enabling to consider the effect of radio interference on software defined multi-channel wireless mesh network (SD-WMN). In our SD-WMN, a set of APs, each of which uses a single and different channel, is connected by Ethernet each other and thus constructs a VAP handling multiple channels. The OpenFlow technology, which enables us to programmably control traffic, is employed to effectively utilize multiple channels in SD-WMN for improvement of the network capacity. Although we already proposed several channel utilization methods, either channel may be saturated even if other channels still have residual capacity. This is because the radio interference inevitably occurs inside WMN due to multi-hop transmission nature. Thus, to avoid the saturation of either channel while utilizing all channels effectively, we propose a new method that can consider the effect of radio interference inside WMN. In the method, all interfered APs can be reliably detected and the network load is balanced in conjunction with the interfered APs by considering the radio interference. From the experimental results, the proposed method can avoid the saturation of either channel successfully, thereby increasing the network capacity drastically.