QF-MAC: Adaptive, Local Channel Hopping for Interference Avoidance in Wireless Meshes

Abstract

The throughput efficiency of a wireless mesh network with potentially malicious external or internal interference can be significantly improved by equipping routers with multi-radio access over multiple channels. For reliably mitigating the effect of interference, frequency diversity (e.g., channel hopping) and time diversity (e.g., carrier sense multiple access) are conventionally leveraged to schedule communication channels. However, multi-radio scheduling over a limited set of channels to minimize the effect of interference and maximize network performance in the presence of concurrent network flows remains a challenging problem. The state-of-the-practice in channel scheduling of multi-radios reveals not only gaps in achieving network capacity but also significant communication overhead. This paper proposes an adaptive channel hopping algorithm for multi-radio communication, QuickFire MAC (QF-MAC), that assigns per-node, per-flow ``local'' channel hopping sequences, using only one-hop neighborhood coordination. QF-MAC achieves a substantial enhancement of throughput and latency with low control overhead. QF-MAC also achieves robustness against network dynamics, i.e., mobility and external interference, and selective jamming attacker where a global channel hopping sequence (e.g., TSCH) fails to sustain the communication performance. Our simulation results quantify the performance gains of QF-MAC in terms of goodput, latency, reliability, communication overhead, and jamming tolerance, both in the presence and absence of mobility, across diverse configurations of network densities, sizes, and concurrent flows.