Equipping wireless routers with multiple radios further improves the capacity by transmitting over multiple radios simultaneously using orthogonal channels. Efficient channel assignment schemes can greatly alleviate the interference effect of nearby transmissions. One of the distinctive features in wireless multi-hop networks is the lack of any central controller, in which each node makes its own decisions. Therefore, fully cooperative behaviors, such as cooperation for increasing link capacity, alleviating interferences for one another, might not be directly applied. In this paper, we aim to present some applications to show how such a framework can be invoked to design efficient channel assignment algorithms in a non-cooperative, topology-blind environment as well as in environments where the competing players share perfect information about channel usage and topology environment and so on. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithms.

In multi-cell OFDMA-based networks, co-channel interference (CCI) is inevitable when the frequency reuse scheme is used. The CCI affects the performance of users, especially that of cell edge users. Several frequency reuse schemes and subcarrier allocation algorithms have been proposed to solve the CCI problem. Nevertheless, it is difficult to improve both the cell capacity and the performance of cell edge users since they have a trade-off. In this paper, we propose a new balanced frequency reuse (BFR) as a new frequency partitioning scheme that gives more power to the users in the outer region and allocates more subcarriers to the users in the inner region. In addition, we propose ordering and directional subcarrier allocation (ODSA) for our frequency partitioning proposal to mitigate the CCI effectively when cells have heterogeneous traffic loads. The performance of the proposed BFR with the ODSA algorithm is investigated via analyses and simulations. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed BFR with the ODSA algorithm can increase both the spectral efficiency and the performance of cell edge users if the transmission power is appropriately handled.