Joint Channel Assignment and Routing Using Partially Overlapped Channels in Multi-radio Multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks (MRMC WMNs) are implemented in IEEE 802.11 standards and are widely used due to its adaptability in practical network scenarios. In MRMC WMNs, channel assignment and routing both determine the traffic distribution over channels and links because the links of different channels can transmit in parallel, which requires the channel assignment algorithm to assign different channels to the radio frequency on the node and select a channel for each link on the routing path. However, the orthogonal channels are typically the only channels used in IEEE 802.11-based MRMC WMNs, which wastes the radio spectrum usage and causes capacity reduction. In this paper, we fully exploit the spectrum resource in IEEE 802.11 2.4 GHz bands and propose a scheme called joint channel assignment and routing using partially overlapping channels (JCARPOC), in which joint solving channel assignment and routing uses all the available channels and achieves collision-free transmissions. Simulation results show that JCARPOC leads to better spectrum utilization and throughput improvement.