Channel Allocation and Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey and Qualitative Comparison Between Schemes

In order to avoid transmission's collisions and improve network performances in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), a reliable and efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and a good channel allocation are needed. Allowing multiple channels use in the same network is often presented as a possible way to improve the network capacity. As IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15 and IEEE 802.16 standards provide more than one channel, thus a trivial way to improve the network performances is to allow transmission on multiple channels in each network node. A lot of research works have been conducted in the area of multi-channel allocation in order to improve the aggregate bandwidth of the whole network.