A Distributed Channel Assignment for 802.11-based Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper we propose a distributed channel assignment protocol (DCAP) for topology formation in the IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh network. The non-overlapping channels are assigned to the network interfaces according to the simple heuristics (such as degree and node-ID) with the goals to enable connectivity and reduce interference in the network. Ns-2 simulation results are presented and compared with the solutions from integer linear programming (ILP) and the common channel assignment (CCA) algorithm. We measured the number of concurrent links, average throughput and the end-to-end latency. We showed that the DCAP produces optimally connected topology and performs better in all cases compared to CCA.