A new channel assignment algorithm for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks(WMNs) provide connectivities and services to participating nodes by establishing a mesh topology through self-organization and selfconfiguration of mesh routers and clients. Mesh nodes can be equipped with multiradios to improve the overall capacity of the WMNs. Nodes avoid interference with each other by tuning to different channels of the spectrum space. The key problem is how to allocate the channels to these multi-radio nodes, especially when they are heterogeneous with diverse transmission types and bandwidths. Most of current work has been based on the conflict-graph model and given solutions that focused on either increasing bandwidth utilization or minimizing starvation. In this paper, we propose a new bipartite-graph based model and design a channel allocation algorithm that considers both bandwidth utilization and starvation problem. Our solution is based on using augmenting path to find a matching in the bipartite-graph and can minimize starvation and then maximize the bandwidth utilization. The simulations demonstrate that our algorithm can reduce the starvation ratio and improve the bandwidth utilization, compared with previous conflict-graph based algorithms.