Assigning and scheduling partially overlapping channels in wireless mesh networks

The efficiency of multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks can be improved with the increase of the number of channels and radios. Despite the availability of up to 11 channels in 802.11, we can choose only up to three non overlapping channels at any given time. In this study, we investigate how to design a channel assignment and a scheduling algorithm, which both exploit partially overlapping channels in order to maximize the throughput. We next examine how much additional throughout we can obtain by doing so, in comparison with only using three orthogonal channels. Numerical experiments show that we can gain up to 25% of throughput by appropriately managing overlapping channels.