Interference-Aware Channel Assignments with Seamless Multi-Channel Monitoring in Wireless Mesh Networks

The wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are statically deployed on heterogeneous areas and are operating in open wireless media, and thus it coexists with other networks operating on the same frequency with the same or different radio access technology (RAT). The WMNs experience two types of interferences according to the source of interference. Coexisted networks with WMN induce the interference called external interference and nodes in WMN experience interference each other, which is called internal interference. Most of existing protocols strive for dealing with internal interference. But the increased external interferences can degrade the performance of WMN significantly. To resolve this coexistence problem, we propose three channel assignment schemes for hybrid multi-channel protocol (HMCP) by capturing the states of each channel and selecting its operating channel. We also devise a seamless multi-channel monitoring method to recognize channel states without performance degradation. Intensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed channel assignment schemes outperform existing HMCP´s channel assignment scheme in terms of aggregate throughput, delay, and fairness.