WSN16-4: Logical Topology Design and Interface Assignment 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 interface operates on a distinct frequency channel. Two neighboring routers establish a logical link if each one has an interface operating on a common channel. Given the physical topology of the routers and other constraints, the logical topology formation algorithm determines the set of logical links. In general, since the number of NICs is limited, some logical links need to share an NIC in a router. The interface assignment algorithm determines the interface that a logical link should be attached to. In this paper, we formulate the logical topology design and interface assignment as a joint optimization problem to obtain an MC-WMN architecture, called TiMesh. We conducted extensive ns-2 simulation experiments to evaluate our algorithm and compared it with another MC-WMN architecture called Hyacinth. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme achieves a higher aggregated network goodput and lower end-to-end delay for both TCP and UDP traffic.