Joint logical topology design, interface assignment, channel allocation, and routing for multi-channel wireless mesh networks

A multi-channel wireless mesh network (MC-WMN) consists of a number of stationary wireless routers, where each router is equipped with multiple network interface cards (NICs). Each NIC operates on a distinct frequency channel. Two neighboring routers establish a logical link if each one has an NIC operating on a common channel. Given the physical topology of the routers and other constraints, four important issues should be addressed in MC-WMNs: logical topology formation, interface assignment, channel allocation, and routing. Logical topology determines the set of logical links. Interface assignment decides how the logical links should be assigned to the NICs in each wireless router. Channel allocation selects the operating channel for each logical link. Finally, routing determines through which logical links the packets should be forwarded. In this paper, we mathematically formulate the logical topology design, interface assignment, channel allocation, and routing as a joint linear optimization problem. Our proposed MC-WMN architecture is called TiMesh. Extensive ns-2 simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of TiMesh and compare it with two other MC-WMN architectures Hyacinth [1] and CLICA [2]. Simulation results show that TiMesh achieves higher aggregated network throughput and lower end-to-end delay than Hyacinth and CLICA for both TCP and UDP traffic. It also provides better fairness among different flows.