A new channel, power and rate assignment 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 consequent problem to assign channels to radios has been recently investigated and its relation to the routing problem has been revealed. The joint channel assignment and routing problem has been shown to be NP-complete and hence mainly heuristics have been proposed. However, such heuristics consider wireless links just like wired links, whereas disregarding their peculiar features. In this paper, we consider the impact of tuning the transmission power and rate of the wireless links on the efficiency of the channel assignment. Then, we present a channel, power and rate assignment heuristic and compare its performance to previously proposed algorithms.