Channel quality and utilization metric for interference estimation in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks have emerged as an architectural shift from traditional wire- less networks for providing ubiquitous coverage. The mesh routers equipped with multiple 802.11 commodity network cards provide high throughput by maximizing the simultane- ous transmissions on multiple channels. However, the selection of a channel is affected by various factors and it requires accurate knowledge of channel conditions. In addition, an imprecise selection of the channel requires channel reassignment, which significantly re- duces the network performance. The existing schemes have suffered to gratifying the ag- gregate effect of interference. In this paper, we propose a Channel Quality and Utilization Metric (QUAM) that selects less interfering channels. The QUAM employs MAC specifica- tion parameters to acquire utilization awareness of various channels in the vicinity. The channel utilization helps to cater the effect of co-channel interference, whereas, to accom- modate the impact of adjacent channel interference; the channels are further quantified by considering the channel quality. The proposed metric is evaluated through extensive sim- ulations experiments. The simulation results demonstrated the validation of QUAM with a significant improvement in terms of network throughput and a decline in network delay and packet losses.