Static Channel Assignment in Multi-radio Multi-Channel 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks: Issues, Metrics and Algorithms

The combination of multiple radio nodes in conjunction with a suitably structured multi-hop or mesh architecture has the potential to solve some of the key limitations of present day wireless access networks that are based on single-radio nodes. This paper addresses the static channel assignment problem for multi-channel multi-radio static wireless mesh networks. We present four metrics based on which mesh channel assignments can be obtained. In particular, we focus on minimization of the average and maximum collision domain sizes and show that these problems are closely related to problems in combinatorial optimization such as MAX k-CUT and MIN kPARTITION. We also present heuristic algorithms for solving the channel assignment problems using the above two metrics.