• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.12B
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• pp.1050-1057
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• 2008

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have recently become a hot issue to support high link capacity in wireless access networks. The IEEE 802. I 1 standard which is mainly used for the network interface technology in WMNs supports up to 3 or 12 multiple channels according to the IEEE 802.11 specification. However, two important problems must be addressed when we design a channel assigmnent algorithm: channel dependency problem and channel scanning delay. The former occurs when the dynamic channel switching of an interface leads to the channel switching of other interfaces to maintain node connectivity. The latter happens per channel switching of the interface, and affects the network performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the Distance-Based Channel Assigmnent (DB-CA) scheme for multi-channel WMNs to solve such problems. In DB-CA, nodes just perform channel switching without channel scanning to communicate with neighboring nodes that operate on different channels. Furthermore, DB-CA minimizes the interference of channels being used by nodes near the gateway in WMNs. Our simulation results show that DB-CA achieves improved performance in WMNs.