Patent ID: 7849216

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a transceiver configured to be in data communication with an associated mesh network; and channel assignment logic in data communication with the transceiver, the channel assignment logic is operable to assign backhaul channels to each access point of the associated mesh network, wherein each access point comprises at least two transceivers for communicating on at least two channels respectively; wherein the channel assignment logic is configured to acquire collision domain data for each access point of the associated mesh network wherein the collision domain is defined as a node's (k+1)-hop neighborhood, where k is the ratio between the carrier sense range and the communication range wherein the channel assignment logic is configured to assign a backhaul channel to each access point of the associated mesh network in order to minimize a maximum number of weighted nodes sharing the channel within a collision domain; wherein the channel assignment logic assigns at least a first downlink channel and a second downlink channel to a root access point; wherein the channel assignment logic assigns an uplink channel for a first one hop access point to the first downlink channel of the root access point, and further assigns a separate first downlink channel to the first one hop access point, wherein all child access points for the first one hop access point are assigned an uplink channel corresponding to the downlink channel of the first one hop access point; and wherein the channel assignment logic assigns an uplink channel for a second one hop access point to the second downlink channel of the root access point, and further assigns a separate downlink channel to the second one hop access point, wherein all child access points for the second one hop access point are assigned an uplink channel corresponding to the downlink channel of the second one hop access point.