Performance Evaluation of Automatic Channel Assignment Mechanism for IEEE 802.11 Based on Graph Colouring

We present the design and implementation of graph colouring - based channel assignment mechanism for infrastructure mode IEEE 802.11 networks. Several enhancements to earlier designs as well as results from a thorough performance evaluation in a WLAN testbed are given. The performance of the colouring scheme is compared with random and "fixed default" channel assignments, as these are the ones commercially available access points most often use. It is shown that the colouring approach leads to improved utilization of wireless resources, and considerably enhances the performance of the networks