An adaptive channel utilization method with traffic balancing for multi-hop multi-channel wireless backbone network

Abstract

This chapter presents an effective channel utilization method for a multi-hop wireless backbone network (WBN) constructed with multiple channels. In the previous work, we proposed a novel OpenFlow based management framework for the WBN, which enables access points to handle the unlimited number of channels simultaneously. Since the framework also enables us to easily and programmably use channels for packet forwarding, the utilization of multiple channels can be potentially optimized, thereby maximizing the network capacity of the WBN. However, since the previous work focused on the framework, the effective use of multiple channels was not completely addressed. Therefore, in this chapter, we propose a channel utilization method that balances the amount of traffic among multiple channels to maximize the network capacity. Through the performance evaluation in a real testbed, the proposed method can effectively use all channels in a 3-hop WBN.