Utilization and Balance in Channel Assignment for Rural Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks with directional antennas are expected to be a new promising technology and an economic approach for providing wireless broadband services in rural areas. In these networks, the effective use of multiple non-overlapping channels can significantly enhance the network capacity by allowing more concurrent transmissions. However, the performances of wireless mesh networks are severely degraded by interference between links with overlapping channels in nearby areas. In this paper, we address the issue of joint utilization and balance in channel assignment for rural wireless mesh networks. We design a new channel assignment framework with the goal of optimizing the channel resource utilization across the entire network while taking balanced allocation into account. This balanced channel assignment allows for the cost-effective reuse of channels without a consequent loss of quality in the rural wireless mesh networks. We also evaluate the proposed framework on some Cartesian product graphs that are popular interconnection network topologies. The framework guarantees that these topologies require a small number of channels for balanced allocation.