A multi-channel assignment for wireless networks with a limited number of channels

In multi-channel wireless networks, the interferences due to simultaneous transmissions of neighboring nodes can be reduced by assigning different non-overlapping orthogonal channels to sender-receiver pairs that may interfere with each other. However, if the number of non-overlapping channels is smaller than that of interfering nodes, we cannot avoid assigning the same channels to adjacent interfering nodes. We propose a multi-channel assignment algorithm for wireless networks with a limited number of multi-channels. It attempts to minimize the geographically overlapped areas among interference circles (defined as “guard zones”) of neighboring nodes. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed algorithm improves the aggregate throughput performance by fully exploiting the multichannel diversity even though the number of non-overlapping channels is not sufficiently large.