A Survey of Various Routing and Channel Assignment Strategies for MR-MC WMNs

One fundamental problem of WMNs with a limited number of radio interfaces and orthogonal channels is that the performance degrades significantly as the network size grows. This results from increased interference between nodes and diminished spatial reuse over the network. A WMN node needs to share a common channel with each of its neighbours in the communication range, requiring it to set up a virtual link. Moreover, to reduce network interference, a node should minimize the number of neighbours that it shares a common channel with. The objective of a channel assignment strategy is to ensure efficient utilization of the available channels (e.g., by minimizing interference) while maximizing connectivity in the network. However, since these two requirements are conflicting with each other, the goal is to achieve a balance between these two. The major constraints which need to be satisfied by a channel assignment scheme include fixed number of channels in the network, limited number of radios in mesh nodes, common channel between two communicating nodes, and limited channel capacity. Also, a channel assignment scheme should take the amount of traffic load supported by each mesh node into consideration.