Routing and channel assignment schemes for interference avoidance in wireless mesh networks

This dissertation presents efficient routing and channel assignment schemes for interference avoidance in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). The significant contributions of this dissertation is the development and design of two routing algorithms that help in improving network throughput by selecting less interference paths both for single and multiple radio WMNs and the design of an intelligent channel assignment scheme which increases the overall network capacity by assigning partially overlapped channels (POCs) having less interference among neighboring ones for multi radio multi channel wireless mesh networks (MRMC-WMNs).;For single radio single channel WMNs, we propose AMIRA (Ant Mesh routing for InteRference Avoidance), an interference-aware routing protocol designed to improve load balancing by avoiding inter and intra flow interference in a typical WMN. AMIRA is based on the framework of Ant Colony Optimization which is a meta-heuristic approach for stochastically solving a problem together with our local heuristic technique to avoid interference within and among packet flows.;We then extend our work of AMIRA to develop a forwarding architecture called AntMesh which is designed for both single and multiple radio WMNs and take care of both inter and intra flow interferences. In addition, we also propose a novel routing metric called Ant Routing Metric which is designed to effectively utilize the space/channel diversity typically common in WMNs.;We address the problem of channel assignment considering partially overlapped channels (POCs) for interference avoidance in MRMC-WMNs. A novel interference model is proposed which provides a systematic approach of measuring interference caused by links operating on POCs by taking into account both adjacent channel interference and physical distance between mesh nodes. Based on this model, we design an interference-aware channel assignment algorithm called i-POCA which enables the use of smart ants for assigning POCs to radios in order to minimize total network interference.