A Genetic Approach to Channel Assignment for Multi-radio Multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks


Abstract

Multi-channel communication in a Wireless Mesh Network with routers having multiple radio interfaces significantly enhances the network capacity. Efficient channel assignment is critical for realization of optimal throughput in such networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding the largest number of links that can be connected with the overall network interference is minimized. Since the number of radios on any node can be less than the number of available channels, the channel assignment must obey the constraint that the number of different channels assigned to the links incident on any node is at most the number of radio interfaces on that node. The above optimization problem is known to be NP-hard. By presenting the theoretical model, the above task is formulated as a multi-objective problem, and then a novel channel assignment based on improved NSGA-II is proposed. Extensive empirical evaluations represent that the novel algorithm proposed in this paper can implement network connectivity with little interference rapidly and efficiently. To meet the actual demand in wireless mesh network, ns-2 simulations are used to demonstrate the performance potential of our channel assignment algorithms in 802.11-based multi-radio mesh networks.