Architecture and algorithms for an IEEE 802.11-based multi-channel wireless mesh network

— Even though multiple non-overlapped channels exist in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrum, most IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop ad hoc networks today use only a single channel. As a result, these networks rarely can fully exploit the aggregate bandwidth available in the radio spectrum provisioned by the standards. This prevents them from being used as an ISP’s wireless last-mile access network or as a wireless enterprise backbone network. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel wireless mesh network (WMN) architecture (called Hyacinth) that equips each mesh network node with multiple 802.11 network interface cards (NICs). The central design issues of this multi-channel WMN architecture are channel assignment and routing. We show that intelligent channel assignment is critical to Hyacinth’s performance, present distributed algorithms that utilize only local traffic load information to dynamically assign channels and to route packets, and compare their performance against a centralized a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Ashish Raniwala, Tzi-cker Chiueh
• Keywords: Ad Hoc Network, Communications, INFOCOM 2005, Mesh Network, Mesh Network Node