Architecture and algorithms for an IEEE 802.1 1 -based multi-channel wireless mesh network

Even though multiple non-overlapped channels exist in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum, most IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop ad hoc networks today use only a single channel. As a result, these networks rarely can fully exploit the aggregate bandwidth available in the radio spectrum provisioned by the standards. This prevents them from being used as an ISP's wireless last-mile access network or as a wireless enterprise backbone network. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel wireless mesh network (WMN) architecture (called Hyacinth) that equips each mesh network node with multiple 802.11 network interface cards (NICs). The central design issues of this multi-channel WMN architecture are channel assignment and…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• NI
  National Institute of Standards and Technology