Abstract
Channel assignment is an important issue in high throughput multi-channel wireless networks. Previous works on channel assignment use a common control channel to negotiate data channels by exchanging RTS/CTS. However, these schemes require time synchronous mechanism for starting to negotiation in each contention window, which is hard to achieve in wireless networks. Moreover, the above negotiation-based scheme may incur the channel switching delay during channel assignment in each hop of a multi-hop communication. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous scheme for channel assignment based on clustering all nodes in a wireless network into a hierarchical clustering architecture. With the hierarchical clustering architecture, our scheme can elect the cluster head of highest level and allocates channels by the cluster head of highest level to all leaves in a level-by-level basis. Simulation results show that the proposed channel assignment scheme outperforms the negotiation-based schemes in terms of packet collision, end-to-end delay, and overall throughput.