Self-Reconfigurable Wireless Mesh Networks

Due to channel interference, dynamic obstacles, channel fading and/or applications‟ bandwidth demands Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) experience frequent link failures during their lifetime. Multihop WMNs are equipped with multiple radio and multiple channels in every node. These failures cause severe performance degradation in WMNs. Expensive manual network management is required for their real-time recovery. This paper presents a Reconfiguration Algorithm (RA) which is also embedded with interference aware channel assignment that enables a multi-radio WMN to recover from local link failures to preserve network performance. The proposed method makes necessary changes in local radio and channel assignments in order to recover from failures, by using channel and radio diversities in WMNs. The method uses a default channel for transmission till the reconfiguration is done. Based on current channel and radio associations, feasible local configuration changes available around a faulty area are identified. Then, by imposing current network settings as constraints, RA identifies reconfiguration plans that require the minimum number of changes for the network settings. Based on the generated configuration changes and interference aware channel assignment, the system co-operatively reconfigures network settings among local mesh routers. The results show that the proposed algorithm improves channel-efficiency and throughput and has the ability of meeting the applications‟ bandwidth demands.