MULTI-CHANNEL WIRELESS

MESH NETWORKS

Advisor : Chia-Chi Huang

Co-Advisor : Chih-Min Yu
Student : Laith Alsmadi
2011/05/18
OUTLINE
 Introduction
 System Architecture

 Evaluation Metric

 A. Centralized Channel Assignment

 Algorithm Overview
 B. Distributed Channel Assignment
 Load balancing routing
 Interface-Channel Assignment
 Implementation Experiences
 Simulation Results

 Conclusion
2
 References
INTRODUCTION
 A (WMN) wireless mesh network is similar in concept to
a mobile ad hoc network
 the IEEE 802.11b/g standards and IEEE 802.11a
standard provide 3 and 12 non-overlapped frequency
channels, respectively, which could be used
simultaneously within a neighborhood.
 Ability to utilize multiple channels substantially increase
the effective bandwidth available to wireless networks

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SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

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EVALUATION METRIC
 The goal of the channel assignment and routing is to
maximize to the overall network goodput.
 To formalize this goal, we define the cross-section
goodput of a network as

where C(a; gi) is the useful network bandwidth available between a traffic
aggregation device a and a gateway node gi. B(a) is the bandwidth
requirement between a traffic aggregation device a and the wired network.
 This criteria ensures that only the usable bandwidth of a
network is counted towards its cross-section throughput,
hence the term cross-section goodput. 5
A. CENTRALIZED CHANNEL ASSIGNMENT
INPUT AND OUTPUT
ALGORITHM OVERVIEW
 At the beginning, we estimate the
initial link loads
 Next, we iterate multiple times
through the channel assignment and
routing steps. We call these iterations
the exploration phase.
 The convergence phase is similar to
the exploration phase except that the
routing algorithm now only re-routes
the non-conforming flows.
 The convergence phase is then
repeated until the cross-section
goodput of the resulting network
converges.
INITIAL LINK LOAD ESTIMATION
 the capacity of link l:
 where Q is the number of available channels, CQ is the capacity per
channel, and Ll are the number of virtual links within the interference
range of l.
 The equation essentially divides the aggregated channel capacities
among all interfering links, without regard to number of NICs per node.
 assume perfect load balancing across all acceptable paths between each
communicating node pair. call the number of acceptable paths between a
pair of nodes (s,d), P(s,d), and the number of acceptable paths that pass
a link l, Pl(s,d). Then the expected load on link:
 Where B(s,d) is the estimated load between
the node pair in the traffic profile.
 This equation says that the initial expected load on a link is the sum of
loads from all acceptable paths, across all possible node pairs, that pass 7
through the link.
CHANNEL ASSIGNMENT
 The channel assignment problem:
 Given the expected load on each virtual link,

 The goal of channel assignment algorithm is to assign

channels to network interfaces such that the resulting
available bandwidth on these interfaces is at least equal
to their expected traffic load.
GREEDY HEURISTICS
 Traverse links in
decreasing order of load load
100
 Link with high load gets
200
channel with less 150
250

contention 10

 Case 1 50

 Both A & B have unused

interfaces A
Channel 7
B
 Use channel with least
1 2
contention 6 7 3 interfaces
7

A’s channel list B’s channel list

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Use Channel 7
TRAVERSING LINKS
 Case 2
 Only B has unused A
Channel 8
B
interface
2 1
 Use channel with least
3 8 3 interfaces
contention from A’s list 8

A’s channel list B’s channel list

 Case 3 Use Channel 8

 Neither node has unused A
Channel 5
B
interface
5
5 5
 Use common channel if
7 6 3 interfaces
there is one 9 8

A’s channel list B’s channel list 10

Use Channel 5
TRAVERSING LINKS
 Case 4
 No unused interface & no
common channel
Channel 2
5
 Merge one A’s channel
with one B’s channel
Channel 2
5
 Channels chosen to
minimize combined
Channel 2
contention A B
 Needs to merge channels 2
2 2
5
network-wide 3 6 3 interfaces
4 7

A’s channel list B’s channel list

Merge channel 2 & 5 11

Great disruption: channel 2 very busy; channel 5 silent

CONTENTION & LINK CAPACITY

 Level of contention

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 Consider neighboring links within carrier sense range
using the same channel
 Sum up their loads

 Link capacity estimation

Load i
Capacityi   Capacity Channel
 Load j
jCSRange i  i, j: links in the same channel
ROUTING
 two different routing algorithms
 (1) shortest path routing
 (2) randomized multipath routing.

 The shortest path refers to the shortest “feasible” path,

i.e., a path with sufficient available bandwidth and least
hop-count.
 The multi-path routing algorithm attempts to achieve
load balancing by distributing the traffic between a pair
of nodes among multiple available paths at run time.

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B. DISTRIBUTED CHANNEL
ASSIGNMENT
LOAD BALANCING ROUTING
 Each WMN node needs to discover
a path to reach one or multiple
wired gateway node
 Each wired gateway node is the
root of a spanning tree, and each
WMN node attempt to participate
in one spanning tree
 The ADVERTISE packet sends out
contains the “cost” of reaching the
wired network

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ROUTING METRIC
 Three different cost metrics.

 Hop count: minimum number of hops

 Gateway link capacity: residual capacity of the uplink that
connects the root gateway. Residual capacity of any link is
determined by subtracting the current usage of the link from
its overall capacity.
 Path capacity: minimum residual bandwidth of the path that
connects a WMN node to the wired network.

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NEIGHBOR-INTERFACE BINDING
 Ripple effect

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FAILURE RECOVERY

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IMPLEMENTATION EXPERIENCES -
CENTRALIZED
 interference for two cards residing on a single node
using 802.11b, and for 4-node multi-channel mesh
network.
 Table: last column indicates the total goodput achieved
as a % of sum of individual goodputs without
interference. The link layer data rate was clamped to 11
Mbps.

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 Reduced interference :
 use USB cards instead of PCI/PCMCIA cards and place them side-by-side
 use of external antennas and place the external antennas slightly away from
each other.
 use the upcoming Engim chipsets, it receive the complete spectrum, digitize
it and process it to compensate for inter-channel interference.

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 Multi-channel 802.11b Testbed. Each node is equipped
with 2 cards whose channels were determined based on
the load-aware channel assignment algorithm.
 The performance improvement in this case is limited by
the number of non-overlapping available channels for
802.11b standard (3).

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IMPLEMENTATION EXPERIENCES -
DISTRIBUTED
 9-node prototype. Each node equipped with two different
network interfaces . an Orinoco 802.11a/b/g PCI card
and a Netgear 802.11a/b/g PCI card.
 Each DOWN-NIC and the associated child nodes' UP-
NICs are assigned to a common channel
 Channel assignment/Routing protocol also requires
collecting detailed traffic statistics from individual
interfaces.

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 Each node is equipped with 2 802.11a PCI NICs whose channels are tuned
dynamically by the channel/route daemon.
 FTP bandwidth: The aggregate performance of the flows in the multi-
channel operation mode is 55.58 Mbps, which is about 5 times the
aggregate throughput in the single-channel operation mode (11.32 Mbps).

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SIMULATION RESULTS
 distributed channel assignment improves the network throughput 6 to 7
times as compared with a single-channel network.

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 The network goodput increases with the number of gateway nodes in the
network

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CONCLUSION
 The bandwidth issue is most severe for multi-hop
wireless mesh networks due to interference among
successive hops of an individual path as well as among
neighboring paths.
 A channel assignment needs to balance between
maintaining network connectivity and increasing
aggregate bandwidth
 The distributed channel assignment / routing algorithm
we developed for the WMN can achieve a factor of 6 to
7 throughput improvement compared to single channel
WMN
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REFERENCES
 A. Raniwala, K. Gopalan, T. Chiueh; “Centralized
Channel Assignment and Routing Algorithms for Multi-
channel Wireless Mesh Networks”, ACM Mobile
Computing & Comm Review (MC2R), April '04.
 A. Raniwala and T. Chiueh, "Architecture and
algorithms for an IEEE 802.11-based multi-channel
wireless mesh network", in Proc. INFOCOM, 2005,
pp.2223-2234.

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