An Energy Efficient Channel Assignment and Routing Algorithm for Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Endowing mesh routers with multiple radios is a recent solution to improve the performance of wireless mesh networks. The approaches proposed in the literature to solve the problem how to assign channels to radio have mainly focused so far on reducing interference or maximizing the throughput. To the best of our knowledge, none of such approaches attempted to save network resources for the purpose of reducing energy consumption and RF emissions. In this paper, a channel assignment and routing algorithm is presented aiming to turn off as many radio interfaces as possible while providing a required level of performance. Simulation studies show that the proposed algorithm enables to achieve nearly the same performance of traditional algorithms while considerably reducing the number of radio interfaces turned on.