An architecture to increase performance of self-organizing networks

The unpredictable variations of the characteristics of wireless and ad hoc networks make Quality of Service (QoS) support difficult. Wireless Mesh Networks consti-tute an alternative to provide QoS in an ad hoc network. This paper proposes a wireless mesh solution that reduces co-channel interference and simplifies both services and re-sources management. The architecture is based on a topol-ogy control or clustering scheme and a channel assignment mechanism. The network is organized hierarchically in or-der to obtain a seamless stable backbone. The cluster-ing scheme aims to achieve a maximum number of covered nodes and a minimum hop count, while providing a topol-ogy minimizing co-channel interference by means of a chan-nel assignment algorithm. Performance evaluation in NS-2 shows that resource management in a cluster can be uncou-pled from that of neighboring clusters and that the network achieves improved performance compared to a classical ad hoc network.