Interference-aware channel assignment in a metropolitan multi-radio wireless mesh network with directional antennas

We investigate the problem of channel assignment in a metropolitan multi-radio wireless mesh network with directional antennas. Our contributions include a new conflict graph model for capturing the interference between links in a mesh network with a known wireless interface communication graph, and a new channel assignment procedure which accounts for interference both between links inside the mesh network, and from external sources. Additionally, we have implemented and evaluated the proposed channel assignment procedure in an actual metropolitan mesh network with 1.6-5 km links. Key components of the channel assignment procedure are the interference model, the link ordering, and the channel selection metric. The experimental results demonstrate how link ordering and the channel selection metric affect performance, in terms of the average packet delay and http latency. The results show that the proposed channel assignment procedure achieves performance very close to a lower bound of the average packet delay, and significantly higher than the performance achieved with a simpler interference-unaware procedure, and a measurement-based scheme that has appeared in the literature, and accounts for interference only from external 802.11 sources. Moreover, we investigate the performance when a different number of channels are available, and the timescales for channel re-assignment.