Section: New Results

Throughput maximisation in multi-radio wireless networks

Participants : Isabelle Guérin Lassous, Busson Anthony.

Wireless mesh network offers a simple and costless solution to deploy wireless based infrastructure network. They are particularly suitable when the network is deployed temporarily, such as substitution networks (studied in the ANR RESCUE project). In order to ensure an important capacity, the mesh nodes may be equipped with several 802.11 network interfaces. The classical approach to assign 802.11 channels to these interfaces aim to minimise global interference, i.e. minimise the conflict graph. Our proposition is two folds. We define a new benefit function that describes the network capacity rather than interference/conflicts. Also, we derive an efficient algorithm that maximises this function. Simulation results show that the proposed function is very close to the measured end-to-end throughputs, empirically proving that it is the good function to optimise. Moreover, the channel assignation algorithm based on this optimisation presents an important throughput increase compared to the classical approaches.