Patent ID: 7283834

Claim:
In a wireless network comprising a plurality of nodes, a method for selecting, by a first node, a channel for communicating with a second node, the first node having at least two network interfaces with radios tuned to orthogonal channels, the method comprising: the first node discovering network interfaces of the second node available for communicating with the first node, wherein the first and second nodes are neighbor nodes in a multi-hop ad hoc wireless network and communicate directly without communicating through an access point; with respect to each available network interface of the second node, the first node periodically making a channel quality estimate; and the first node making a channel selection based on the channel quality estimates, wherein making a channel selection comprises: if a first network interface of the second node has a channel quality estimate that is preferable to channel quality estimates of other network interfaces of the second node, and if the channel quality estimate of the first network interface provides an improvement, above a threshold, over the channel quality estimate of a currently-selected network interface of the second node, selecting the first network interface; and otherwise retaining the currently-selected network interface.