Adjacent Channel Interference Reduction in Multichannel Wireless Networks Using Intelligent Channel Allocation

The performance of a multichannel, multi-radio wireless network is often limited by interference due to concurrent transmissions on the same and adjacent channels. These interference effects may be either due to simultaneous traffic activity by the multiple radios within a node or due to transmission by neighboring nodes. In this paper, we discuss simple local-balancing and interference-aware channel allocation algorithms for reducing the overall interference in the network. We evaluate the relative performance of our algo-rithms using actual implementations on a multichannel, multi-radio testbed. Using overall network throughput as a metric, we show through experiments that the channel allocation that is aware of the node’s transmission activity performs better than the simple local-balancing algorithm, irrespective of the number of channels used for allocation. Additionally, we show that the performance bene-fit of a interference-aware allocation over the local-balancing allo-cation improves as the number of flows in the network increases. However, our experiments also reveal that the benefit of using a interference-aware algorithm over the simple local-balancing algo-rithm reduces when we have more number of channels available for allocation when compared to the number of flows in the network. 1