End-to-End Throughput-Aware Channel Assignment in Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are deployed as broadband backbones to provide ubiquitous wireless access for residents and local businesses. Utilizing multiple channels has the potential to scale up the system capacity of wireless access networks with delicately designed channel assignment algorithms. In this paper, we consider a static channel assignment in multi- radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks with the objective of maximizing overall end-to-end throughput. We first present an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization model for this static channel assignment problem. Then, by taking into account the "bottleneck links" of multi-hop flows, we propose a flow-aware heuristic scheme, which decompose this ILP problem into a graph coloring subproblem and a linear programming subproblem. Simulation results on ring and grid topologies show that our scheme has significant gain in terms of network throughput.