IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh networks with directional antennas are expected to be a new promising technology and an economic approach for providing wireless broadband services in rural areas.In this paper,we discuss interference models and address how they can affect the design of channel assignment in rural mesh networks.We present a new channel assignment framework based on graph coloring for rural wireless mesh networks.The goal of the framework is to allow synchronously transmitting or receiving data from multiple neighbor links at the same time,and continuously doing full-duplex data transfer on every link,creating an efficient rural mesh network without interference.Channel assignment is shown to be NP-hard.We frame this channel allocation problem in terms of Adjacent Vertex Distinguishing Edge Coloring(AVDEC).Detailed assignment results on grid topology are presented and discussed.Furthermore,we design an algorithm.Finally,we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm through extensive simulations and show the algorithm is effective to the regular grid topologies,and the number of colors used by the algorithm is upper bounded by+1.Hence the algorithm guarantees that the number of channels available in standards such as IEEE802.11a is sufficient to have a valid AVDEC for many grid topologies.We also evaluate the proposed algorithm for arbitrary graphs.The algorithm provides a lower upper bound on the minimum number of channels to the AVDEC index channel assignment problem.
