Channel Assignment in Wireless Mesh Networks

In wireless networks nodes use the same shared medium for communication. Interferences may occur if two nodes send simultaneously on the same frequency. Channel Assignment approaches try assign different frequencies (or channels) to the wireless devices in order to increase the throughput in a wireless network.

In the DES-Testbed, each node is equipped with multiple IEEE 802.11 transceivers which can be configured to different frequencies. The research focus on the DES-Testbed is on distributed approaches for multi-transceiver network nodes. The already existing DES-Chan framework provides basic services, such as Neighbor Discovery and ETX measuring. A central part of this work is to improve and implement Channel Assignment algorithms. The algorithms will be evaluated and compared in a real network in contrast to simulation environments. The DES-Chan framework may need to be extended with additional services, depending on the developed approaches.

Objectives:

• Get an overview of state-of-the-art Channel Assignment challenges and approaches
• Design and run experiments on the DES-Testbed in order to compare different distributed algorithms
• Improve and implement distributed, multi-transceiver Channel Assign­ment algorithms