CENTRALIZED CHANNEL

ASSIGNMENT AND ROUTING

ALGORITHMS FOR MULTI-CHANNEL
WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS

Advisor : Chia-Chi Huang

Co-Advisor : Chih-Min Yu
Student : Laith Alsmadi
2011/03/29
OUTLINE

 Bandwidth is Never Sufficient

 Primary Research Questions

 Problem Description

 Output and Objective

 Algorithm Overview

 Routing

 Conclusion

 References

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BANDWIDTH IS NEVER SUFFICIENT

 Mesh networks provide ~600 kb/s bandwidth

3
 Still not comparable to Ethernet
 How to increase bandwidth?
 IEEE 802.11 define non-overlapping channels
 Transmissions among channels cause little interference
 Equip nodes with multiple radios
 Use multiple channels at the same time!

Channel 1 Channel 6 Channel 11

2.402 GHz 2.483 GHz

22 MHz
IEEE 802.11b channels
HOW TO USE MULTIPLE CHANNELS?

Internet Internet

4
Channel 11

Channel 1
?
Popular among AP networks How to do it in mesh
networks?

How to do it to improve
throughput efficiently?
PRIMARY RESEARCH QUESTIONS

 Question 1: How to assign channels to interfaces?

 Channel diversity mitigates interference
 Connectivity requires matching channels

Single-channel Interference-free Network partition

network transmissions

Need to strike a balance

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PRIMARY RESEARCH QUESTIONS
 Question 2: How to route packets?

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link loads

Routing Channel Assignment

link capacities

How to consider channel assignment & routing together?

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
Internet

~
50 kb/s
Channels

~
200 kb/s
600 kb/s
200 kb/s

Inputs to the algorithm:

Node placement Traffic profile
Transmission range #interfaces per node
Carrier sense range #non-overlapping channels
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OUTPUT AND OBJECTIVE
 Outputs of the algorithm
 Channel assigned to each interface

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 Route for each communicating node pairs

 Objective
 Max aggregate network throughput
 Match link capacities with loads
ALGORITHM OVERVIEW
 An iterative algorithm
 Switches between channel assignment Traffic Profile
& routing Initial Link Load Estimation

 Starts the loop with initial link Initial Link Loads

Link Loads
loads Channel Assignment

 Terminates when Channels

Link Capacity Estimation

 Capacity ≥ load for all links; or
 Convergence observed Link Capacities

Routing
No proof of convergence or its speed
Link Loads
At the beginning, a rough estimation of link loads is
Capacity ≥ Load No
used as the seed. The channel assignment For All Links?
algorithm governs the capacities of links. The
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routing algorithm uses these capacities to come up Channels
Yes

with routes, and in turn feeds more accurate + Routes

expected loads on the links to the next iteration.
INITIALIZATION & CHANNEL
ASSIGNMENT
 Initial link load estimation
 Node pair evenly splits traffic on all routes
The channel assignment problem

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
 Given: link loads
 Goal: assign channels s.t. capacity ≥ load for all links
 NP-hard in general
 Uses greedy heuristics instead
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 12

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 13

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

Ignores interference outside carrier sense range

 Link capacity estimation

Load i
Capacityi   Capacity Channel
 Load j
jCSRange i  i, j: links in the same channel

Capacity of channel ill-defined

ROUTING

 The routing problem

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 Given: link capacities, traffic profile
 Goal: find feasible paths for each connection

 Claim: algorithm works with any routing scheme

 e.g. shortest path routing
GOODPUT GAIN Comparison of multi-channel network
against single-channel network for MIT
Roofnet topology

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 NS-2 simulation on Roofnet topology
 12 channels; 2 radios per node
 Achieves around 7x throughput gain
EFFECTS OF RESOURCES Impact of increasing the
number of radio
channels and/or cards
per node.
As more channels are

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made available, the
channel assignment
algorithm uses them to
increase the overall
network throughput.
Experiments with
different traffic profiles
show similar graphs.

 Vary #radios per node & #channels

 #channels is a more limiting factor
CONCLUSION & COMMENTS
 Contributions
 Shows the use of multiple channels increases network

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throughput
 Develops a load-aware channel assignment scheme
 Weaknesses
 Centralized algorithm
 Heuristics with no performance guarantee
 Wireless media characteristics not well captured
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.

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