Channel Assignments Utilizing Partially Overlapping Channels for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networking is one of the most promising next generation network technologies. A wireless mesh network is a decentralized, self-organizing, self-configuring and self-healing multi-hop wireless network. In this thesis, we introduce the development, architectures, characteristics and applications of wireless mesh networks and present the existing channel assignments and routing protocols for wireless mesh networks. In recent years, many efforts have been taken to better exploit multiple non-overlapping channels for wireless mesh networks, e.g. IEEE 802.11 a based wire less mesh networks, in which 12 or 24 non-overlapping channels are available. Although the IEEE 802. 11 b/g standards, which govern the unlicensed 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band, provide II channels, only three ofthem, namely I, 6 and II are non-overlapping. In order to better utilize communication bandwidth and improve quality of service, in this thesis, we propose a channel assignment exploiting partially overlapping channels (CAEPO). In CAEPO, the interference a node suffers within its interference range is the main metric for channel assignment. It is defined to be a combination of the overlapping degree between channels and busy time proportion, i.e. channel utilization ratio of interfering nodes. In addition to that, packet loss ratio is another major consideration in the implementation of channel assignment. To further improve the aggregated network performance, we propose Load-Aware CAEPO scheme based on the original CAEPO. In Load-Aware CAEPO, instead of