Channel assignment for multicast in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks

One of the most effective approaches to enhance the throughput capacity of wireless mesh networks (WMN) is to use systems with multiple channels and multiple radios per node. Multi-channel multi-radio (MCMR) networks require efficient channel assignment (CA) algorithms to determine which channel a link should use for data transmission in order to maximize network throughput. The problem of CA has been studied extensively for unicast communications, but addressed only recently for multicast. We propose a CA algorithm named Minimum interference Multi-channel Multi-radio Multicast (M4) that minimizes interference among nodes in a multicast routing tree and uses both orthogonal and overlapping channels such as those in IEEE 802.11b/g systems. Simulation results show that M4 outperforms the Multi Channel Multicast algorithm proposed. in various scenarios with respect to average packet delivery ratio, throughput and end-to-end delay. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.