Classification of Channel Allocation Schemes in Wireless Mesh Network

Introduction

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) is a kind of network topology where every node is connected to the other node as that in mesh network topology. There is a dedicated line of communication of half duplex nature between the nodes. Here the nodes use wireless channel. The nodes are basically access points or mesh routers or both incorporated in a single node, which provide connection to the end users (Saini et al., 2016). The wireless mesh networks are widely used in deploying WLAN’s. The advantageous nature of the deployment of WLAN and its working principle leads to extensive use of it in today’s world. Basically IEEE 802.11 standard has three major protocols IEEE 802.11 a, b, g (Low et al., 2002) which has different bandwidth and modulation. It is a typical network showing ad-hoc nature. The IEEE 802.11 has incorporated the ability of using multi channel and multi radio. Introduction of multiple radio interfaces on the device causes improvement in network capacities, latency and fault tolerance. But, this leads to the problem of assigning channels from the available channel bandwidth so that they perform the best irrespective of the design issues. An example of WMN is shown in Figure 1. Introduction of different channels over multiple radios on single mesh node compels to retrospect different issues such as interference, channel diversity, and channel switching (Islam et al., 2016). Table 1 shows the frequency, bandwidth and modulation used by the above mentioned protocols.