Channel-hopping scheme and channel-diverse routing in static multi-radio multi-hop wireless networks

Abstract

In modern wireless networks with multiple orthogonal (non-overlapping) channels available, one essential performance topic is how to effectively exploit channel diversity to enable parallel communications. Generally, having a radio interface hop through all available channels produces better spectrum diversity than binding it permanently to one channel, at the cost of channel switching delays and potentially compromised network connectivity. Moreover, multi-hop communications become challenging due to the lack of a common rendezvous for discovering routes and the difficulty of relaying packets from hop to hop. In this paper, we propose a multi-radio channel-hopping scheme (CHS) that preserves network connectivity. We prove that less than three radios are required by CHS in order to achieve good channel overlapping in widespread IEEE 802.11-based wireless systems. Corresponding channel-diverse routing (CDR) protocol is devised to realize efficient multi-hop communications. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CDR outperforms other strategies in static IEEE 802.11a multi-hop networking environments.