On the Partially Overlapped Channel Assignment on Wireless Mesh Network Backbone: A Game Theoretic Approach

• Published in: IEEE journal on selected areas in communications Vol. 30; no. 1; pp. 119 - 127
• Main Authors: Duarte, P. B. F., Fadlullah, Z. M., Vasilakos, A. V., Kato, N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-01-2012; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Broadband; channel assignment problem; Channels; Convergence; Game theory; Games; IEEE 802.11 Standards; Interference; Mathematical model; Measurement; Networks; partially overlapped channels; potential games; Recognition; Studies; Wireless communication; Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs)
• ISSN: 0733-8716; 1558-0008
• DOI: 10.1109/JSAC.2012.120111

The Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has already been recognized as a promising broadband access network technology from both academic and commercial perspective. In order to improve the performance of WMNs, extensive research efforts have been dedicated towards finding means to increase the number of simultaneous transmissions in the network while avoiding signal interference among radios. In case of WMNs based on IEEE 802.11 b/g standards, most recent research works have relied upon the usage of orthogonal channels for solving the Channel Assignment (CA) problem. In this paper, we explore the possibility of exploiting Partially Overlapped Channels (POCs) by introducing a novel game theoretic distributed CA algorithm. Our proposed algorithm outperforms both the conventional orthogonal channel approach and the recent heuristic CA algorithms using POC. The proposed algorithm is shown to achieve near-optimal performance in the average case. In addition, the upper bound Price of Anarchy for Multi-Radio Multi-Channel (MRMC) networks is derived to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.