Enhancing Channel Assignment Performance in Wireless Mesh Networks Through Interference Mitigation Functions

TL;DR

This paper evaluates alternative interference estimation metrics, CXLSwt and CDALcost, for channel assignment in wireless mesh networks, demonstrating that CXLSwt significantly improves network performance over traditional TID-based methods.

Contribution

It introduces and assesses the effectiveness of CXLSwt and CDALcost as interference mitigation functions, showing CXLSwt's superiority in enhancing network performance.

Findings

CXLSwt improves network performance by 10-15% over TID.

CDALcost is not more effective than TID or CXLSwt.

Using CXLSwt as IMF enhances interference mitigation in WMNs.

Abstract

The notion of Total Interference Degree (TID) is traditionally used to estimate the intensity of prevalent interference in a Multi-RadioMulti-ChannelWirelessMesh Network (MRMC WMN). Numerous Channel Assignment (CA) approaches, linkscheduling algorithms and routing schemes have been proposed for WMNs which rely entirely on the concept of TID estimates. They focus on minimizing TID to create a minimal interference scenario for the network. In our prior works [1] and [2], we have questioned the efficacy of TID estimate and then proposed two reliable interference estimation metrics viz., Channel Distribution Across Links Cost (CDALcost) and Cumulative X-Link-Set Weight (CXLSwt). In this work, we assess the ability of these interference estimation metrics to replace TID as the interferenceminimizing factor in a CA scheme implemented on a grid MRMC WMN. We carry out a comprehensive evaluation on ns-3 and then conclude from the results that the performance of the network increases by 10-15% when the CA scheme uses CXLSwt as the underlying Interference Mitigation Function (IMF) when compared with CA using TID as IMF. We also confirm that CDALcost is not a better IMF than TID and CXLSwt.