Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as one of the new hot topics in wireless communications. WMNs have been suggested for use in situations in which some or all of the users are mobile or are located in inaccessible environments. Unconstrained transmission in a WMN may lead to the time overlap of two or more packet receptions, called collisions or interferences, resulting in damaged useless packets at the destination. There are two types of collisions; primary collision, due to the transmission of the stations which can hear each other, and hidden terminal collision, when stations outside the hearing range of each other transmit to the same receiving stations. For a WMN, direct collisions can be minimized by short propagation and carrier sense times. Thus, in this paper we only consider hidden terminal collision while neglecting direct collisions.
To reduce or eliminate hidden terminal collision, code division multiple access (CDMA) protocols have been introduced. The collision-free property is guaranteed by the use of spread spectrum communication techniques and the proper assignment of orthogonal codes. Such codes share the fixed channel capacity allocated to the network in the design stage. Thus, it is very important to minimize the number of codes while achieving a proper transmission quality level in CDMA WMNs. In this paper, an efficient heuristic code assignment algorithm for eliminating hidden terminal collision in CDMA WMNs with general topology.