Channel Assignment Algorithm Based on Discrete BFO for Wireless Monitoring Networks

Wireless monitoring networks employ distributed sniffers to capture the transmissions of wireless users. It can be used for wireless network status analysis, fault diagnosis, and resource management, etc. Due to the limited number of sniffers, it is a key topic to optimize sniffers’ channel assignment to collect the maximum transmitted data, so as to maximize the Quality of Monitoring (QoM) of the network. In this paper, a channel assignment algorithm based on discrete Bacterial Foraging Optimization is proposed. A 2D multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) coding is designed to represent the bacterial individual; the bacterial foraging and position updating can achieve the optimized channel assignment scheme for wireless monitoring networks. This algorithm is with low complexity and has provable convergence performance. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient and outperforms the existing algorithms.