Abstract: Due to the unstable link states, broadcasting transmission pattern, and interference between neighbor nodes, routing in Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is much more complicated and unpredictable than wired network. Multi-channel gives an alternative solution to improve the performance by holding more wireless resource. Based on this idea, a novel pipelined fixed channel allocation method for a planned 2.4GHz wireless mesh network is proposed in this paper, and multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) technology is introduced in order to improve the performance of wireless mesh network. Taking the advantages of MIMO’s interference cancellation algorithm and MIMO-MU model, more parallel streams will allowed at one time, which greatly improves the throughput both for UDP and TCP transmission. We apply this method to 802.11b wireless network by assigning the three orthogonal channels to reduce interference between neighbors and increase channel spatial reuse, in which channel 1 and 11 are assigned to backbones of mesh network and channel 6 is assigned for the connections between wireless clients and routers. Compared with normal multi-channel-multi-interface mesh networks, simulation results from NS2 show that by our approach the average throughput is greatly improved and the packet delay is also reduced.

Key words: Wireless Mesh Network, MIMO, and Fixed Channel Allocation