A distributed wireless channel assignment algorithm with collision reduction

Using multiple channels and smart frequency reuse strategy could significantly improve the performance of wireless sensor networks. In this paper we propose an method to determine channel usage based on discrete particle swarming optimization (PSO) algorithm. In stead of searching for a collision-free channel assignment which is not achievable in many scenarios, the goal of our algorithm is to find a channel allocation that results in the least amount of channel interference. Our method search discrete variables in the search space, and candidate solutions containing space-channel reuse. Local node channel state information is used to update the particle velocity as well as the current swarm optimum. Our results show that PSO can find very good channel allocation and significantly increase the overall communication efficiency and battery life.