A novel joint centralized scheduling and channel assignment scheme for IEEE 802.16 mesh networks

IEEE 802.16 standard defines a broadband wireless access network technology, which provides a mechanism for creating multi-hop wireless mesh network. As multiple-access interference is a major limiting factor for the IEEE 802.16 mesh network, multi-channel transmission can eliminate the interference and improve the performance of the network. The efficiency of the multi-channel transmission can be affected by the scheduling and channel-assignment scheme. To reap the full performance potential of the network, we propose a novel combined centralized scheduling and channel assignment algorithm for multi-channel single-transceiver IEEE 802.16 mesh network. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the system performance in aspects of scheduling length and the BS's aggregate throughput in insufficient channels.