Joint Channel Assignment and Routing Protocol for Cognitive Radio Wireless Sensor Networks

Multi-hop transmissions over a single channel that is shared by all the nodes in a network limit the throughput of conventional multi-hop wireless sensor networks. To improve the performance of these networks, the use of multiple channels has been proposed. Channel assignment is an important problem in multi-channel wireless sensor networks; it asks the question of how channels should be assigned so that the network performance in maximized. Many existing channel assignment scheme seek to improve network performance by trying to reduce interference. However, it is not easy to measure the actual amount of interference in a network. We tackled the channel assignment problem from a novel approach. Instead of distributing the nodes, links or network interfaces to different channels to reduce interference, we try to assign as many channels as possible to the links. A new distributed scheme is proposed and we show that is outperforms over comparable schemes.