An On-demand Channel Assignment andRouting Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Multi-Radio WirelessMesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) provide Internet accesses to users by forming backbone networks via multi-hop wireless links. IEEE 802.11 is widely used for WMNs, and IEEE 802.11 standards support 3 or 12 orthogonal channels. However, in multi-hop WMNs, the performance falls sharply with increasing hop count. To solve this problem, channel assignment is very important. Hence, in this thesis, we propose an On-demand Channel Assignment and Routing (OnCAR) protocol that uses distributed channel assignment and routing designed for on-demand traffic. OnCAR can assign channels in a traffic on-demand fashion and provides routing by considering channel diversity. Through NS-2 simulations, we demonstrate that OnCAR shows improved network performance compared with existing channel assignment protocols for WMNs.